Full working farm

The farm is now connected with all 31 lab computers and is running at full bore 24-7. Very few errors are being experienced, however, some of the lab computers, such as 20 and 29, simply refuse to work on select projects. With those exceptions the Farm is still able to produce hundreds of renders per hour which is astronomically faster than before. Each computer averages between 4-15min per rendered frame depending on if the computer is in use by a student or not. With the new found ability to produce so many images in such a short period of time students can now create entirely fully rendered video walk-throughs, realistic sun studies, and hi-def renders in ridiculously short periods of time. The system is also fully expandable to as many more computers as the school would like to add.

Parts on the way

The order in now in progress for all the cables and the two switches. They should both be here by the 21st of April. At this point all that can be done is making sure that all the Lab computers are up to date on the software they need for the big hook up. During the order I was able to get free shipping for the switches but we still paid about the same that was estimated from the proposal.  As a side thought I am going to see if changing the operating system's boot.ini file to /3gb instead of /2gb might provide an increase for performance if the computers have enough free space.

Presentation summary

Backburner Diagram

Cables

With another important detail left out at the moment I realized that with a switch needs cables to connect to the computers. These cabels need to be ethernet but dont have to be Category 6 (Cat 6) which is specialized for gigabit ethernet. However, although  Cat 5e are not officially rated for gigabit ethernet they do provide a very close speed with a small difference. They are 2.50 for Cat 5e and 3.80 for Cat 6. I think that there will need to be around 40 cables but The lengths will vary.

http://www.networkcablingdirectory.com/articles/structured-network-cabling-id_1151.htm

http://www.monoprice.com/products/subdepartment.asp?c_id=105&cp_id=10208

Prototype 2.0 38% faster than original farm! (while using the same 3 computers)

After a successful render over a wireless distribution with less than satisfactory speeds over Wireless g weighing in at 16 min for complete render a new test was performed. This time the same render was taken through a gigabit switch and was able to complete the render in 10min.For a comparison I rendered the same scene with the same rendering engine and the result was a failure due to the complexity of the scene and the lack of resources. It is expected that if it had not failed the render would have taken 40 min (4 min per cycle plus final gather. With Revit the render could have taken over an hour. This test was performed with a complex scene of a basement on production level rendering quality. One thing of note is that the render done by the render farm had some lighting imperfections allong with noticeable strips where they were spliced, however, with some tinkering I am sure that a completely succsessful and extreemly fast result is in the near future.

Materials for the New Proposal

What is Needed

• 2 24 port gigabit switches (or one 48 port gigabit switch)

-I found a potential 48 gigabit switch one from netgear that could meet the need at a price of $599
- I found another for 479 from dell but also a 24 port for 179 (we would need two.

• Many network cables for this project due to the number of computers
• cable covers (so that people can walk on them)
• A way to manage all the wires

• Cloning software such as Norton Ghost could also be very helpful in cloning all the computers so that they would interact seamlessly with each year of upgrades of Autodesk software which we use to create the renders.

New Turn In Design

After several successful tests of backburner in conjunction with 3DS Max it was clear that the goal of creating a render farm was not only possible but within my grasp. However, after a long meeting with Dan (a specialist with the setup of the network at ACE) and Mark (my mentor) it became clear that a separate dedicated render farm was not neccissary. By utilizing the power of all the computers at the disposal of the ACE Academy it is possible to replicate the same results by quantity rather than quality specialized systems. Backburner can use any computer with 3DS Max installed and Backburner running so simply by sending a render in chuncks (bucket rendering) to other computers at ace we could cut the render time to a fraction of the original proccess. However, when I tested this with a small setup of five computers working together I found that it took more time to send and recive the files that would be proccessed than it would to just render the whole picture on the single computer. This was due to the fact that the wireless g pipeline was only 54mbps maximum and shared by many others in the school at the same time. In order to make the speed instantanious and utilize all of our resources to the fullest extent it was proposed that a gigabit switch could be utilized to phisically link all the potential render computers so that transfer speeds would not slow the overal process.

What will the system need?

After much research and deliberation with others, I have finally come up with a "shopping list" of a sort for this project.

Ideal Setup:
->6 or more (rack mount) computers that have:
-64 bit processors with at least dual core
-compatable motherboards
-8gb of ram per proccessor
-gigabit switch
-small hard drive (only a 10gb is needed)(speed is not a factor)
exclusions:any form of a video card is not needed but if it is intigrated it will not harm anything

->Windows Operating Systems for all the computers listed above
-XP professional/windows 7
->1 server & router
->1 license of windows server OS (for an already aquired managing computer)
->cloning software

What do the students do?:

As a school, the students (in Architecture classes) have mainly been creating various building projects ranging from hotels, homes and communities. While in the design process they commonly do preliminary renderings to get a feel for what they are designing. From renders they can see how daylight and internal light is being utilized, how to take advantage of views, and avoid possible poor locations for aspects of of the building. When it comes time for presentations, video walkthroughs and high quality renders are used to show off their final designs.

Introduction

This is my first blog and I am going to be posting my advancement with the ultimate goal of creating a render farm for the ACE Academy. So far I have been working with Autodesk, ZGF Architects, and Northwest IT Services to try and smooth over the planing of the setup. So far the planing stage has progressed to matching up potential components for the system and making sure the software will work. Step two will be to find a way to collect what we will need.