JD wrote: > 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. > > That does work but yes, the system had a bird as soon as I pressed enter If I wanted to say use 3 out of 4 on a single process and use the 4th free core for the system how would I go about that? Thank you by the way!!! Michael -- 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
