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.