On 08/09/2010 01:37 PM, Michael Miles wrote: > 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!!!! > > > > You can - but indirectly. if the process is multithreaded and you want all the cores working on those threads, then when you start up the process: sudo nice -n -10 ProcessPathName will very likely force all threads get on-core before other threads. Danger: There are some system processes that MIGHT get preempted by such a low priority. Se you need to research to see at what priority (nice level) are all the system tasks running. -- 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
