[Beowulf] Newbie Question: Racks versus boxes and good rack solutions for commodity hardware

[arjuna]

Peter:

Thats amazing and insprational:

Vincent, this would address your concern about beowulf for animation
rendering and also cost...

On Sat, Dec 13, 2008 at 9:40 PM, Peter Brady <petertbrady at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello,
>
> If you're interested in do it yourself clustering for rendering
> purposes you may want to check this out: http://helmer.sfe.se/.
>
> On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 10:47 AM, Dmitri Chubarov
> <dmitri.chubarov at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hello,
> >
> > my first reply missed the list by mistake so I will repeat a few points
> that
> > I mentioned there.
> >
> >>
> >> What is 1u?
> >>
> >> What is a blade system?
> >
> > Compute clusters are often built of rack-server hardware meaning boxes
> > different from desktop boxes and chipset that have features not necessary
> > for desktop PCs like ECC memory, redundant power supply units, integrated
> > management processors, RAID controllers, that altogether provide better
> > reliability, since the failure rate for a cluster of a 100 nodes is 100
> > times higher than for a single node. You may not need any of it for a 16
> > node rendering farm.
> >
> >> Anyone using clusters for animation on this list?
> >
> > We are just writing up on a research project on distributed rendering.
> > Rendering is the part in the animation process that requires the most
> > processing power. We used 3dStudio Max (3DS) for modelling and V-Ray for
> > rendering. 3DS has its own utility, called Backburner, for distributing
> > frames among a number of  cluster nodes.
> >
> > We observed that V-Ray failed on some certain frames thus stopping the
> whole
> > rendering queue, therefore the process was not completely automated.
> >
> > I would also repeat that a storage subsystem that uses an array of disks
> is
> > essential for performance.
> >>
> >> At this time I am trying to figure out the racks. Am meeting the
> hardware
> >> guy on Saturday and we were thinking of opening up the PCS i have lying
> >> around and taking measurements of how the mother boards fit into the
> >> cases,with the intention of creating a rack from scratch. Any ideas of
> what
> >> goes into a good rack in terms of size and matieral (assuming it has to
> be
> >> insulated)
> >
> > This sort of rack is more of a research project. On the contrary, the
> usual
> > kind of rack is an IEC standard server rack,
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/19_inch_rack
> >
> >>
> >> Am planning to run animation software (like blender) on it. Since
> >> animation software requires large processing power i am assuming they
> have
> >> already worked on parrallelizing the code...
> >
> >
> > Blender does not seem to have a driver to distribute rendering (I might
> be
> > wrong) but it can generate PovRay scripts and povray can make use of
> > parallel processing in a number of ways.
> >
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
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> >
> >
>



-- 
Best regards,
arjuna
http://www.brahmaforces.com
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