Kwan Lowe wrote: > On Sun, Aug 8, 2010 at 1:52 PM, Michael Miles<mmamiga6@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > >>> >> Well, 3D animation is my thing and has been since the Amiga platform. >> The power to render many minutes of animation and still have functional >> machine to do the rest of my daily activity. >> >> I use a virtual machine running windows 7 for my animation software and >> if I want to convert a HD movie at the same time as I do everything else >> it shows a definite slow down. >> > I run a 4-node rendering cluster ( dual quad-cores on each, or 32 > cores total and 16G RAM each node). They're headless and just have > minimal local disks. All nodes write via bonded 2 x 1Gb Ethernet to a > fileserver, but network is usually not the bottleneck. When in use, > CPUs are pegged for hours at a time. Modeling is done on a quad-core > Windows 7 system with some relatively high-end ATI cards, but gets > final render in the cluster. HD conversion is a minor step since the > renders are done at final resolution. > > My point is that it may be more effective to separate your rendering > hardware. I.e., you can buy a low-end desktop with decent video cards > that will run your software natively *and* a separate, headless > compute node that does all the heavy lifting rather than try to bulk > up a desktop. The desktop will generally have crappy disk i/o, crappy > memory limits (8G is average), crappy network (wireless or GBit), and > your CPU will be busy drawing a pretty desktop than actually rendering > frames. > -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I have noticed a bit of a confusing issue. Lightwave running under Win 7 as a virtual machine under Fedora 12 runs faster than a native Win 7 machine. Strange but true. It easily shaves off 2 - 3 minutes / frame as a virtual machine. Anyway thanks for the comments. Question is there a way to have all my cores assigned to one task? I can easily dedicate the cores to a virtual machine but in a native Fedora environment I was wondering if I can get all cores to work on one task. And one other question. What software are you using for your render cluster? Way back in the Amiga days I was using Renderman as a rendering farm and the Screamernet for the Video Toaster. I have been doing some experimentation with Blender and it looks very good but I'm still looking at Lightwave 9 as the best. It is only ported for Windows though making it a pain as I would like very much to use a native linux enviroment. It also seems that Lightwave butterfly netrender for linux is here http://www.weez.com/2010/08/linux-lightwave-render-farm-getting-bnr-butterfly-netrender-to-work-in-debian-possibly-others/ We shall see!!!! -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
