buying for my farm...

[renderingfarmer]

Despite my clever name (haha I kill me) I know next to nothing about rendering farms. I currently use my 17" PB and a friend of mine helped me set up a PC as a render slave, which helps a lot when I'm under time pressure, but I need to get seriouse now that work is kicking in.

I'd like to buy a few lesser macs to twine together and have working for me, the thing is I don't know which to get. Any suggestions? The cheapest are the eMacs. If I fill them with RAM would that do that trick? Or should I be looking at the PowerMacs, and why?

Also what's the deal with licenses? When I bought LW I got the 7.5 with one Win and one Mac serial, so I installed them both, but do I need to purchase a copy of LW of every new mac I own. That would blow...

anyway, I have faith that you geniuses will enlighten me. Thanks in advance.

[Red_Oddity]

You can install LW on as many computers you like (these can be considered as rendering nodes fro render farming), but since you have just one dongle, you can only work on one computer with LW at the time...As for Mac renderfarming...if you have the money, but loads of G4s with atleast 1Gig of memory (make sure they're the latest models though as they have a somewhat decent memory bus (read:speed))...or buy a ****eload of $500 PCs and stock up on memory, you have the licences anyway...so it doesn't really matter...

[mlinde]

Katonah? NY? Nice place.
The Lightwave rendering engine (LWSN) can be installed and run on as many machines as you can put it on in your lifetime. There are a couple of outstanding problems with network rendering, but overall it can be set up fairly easily. Your best Mac bang-for-the-buck is the eMac. It's a G4, it's a small form factor, it's a low price. Get as many as you can afford, with at least 512 MB of RAM. Some people will say more RAM. If you are rendering 2k cinema frames, get more. If you are rendering for TV, get 512.

Set up your farm with networks switches. Get 10/100 switches, not hubs. Data will transfer faster.

While you are waiting on your hardware, read up on every tutorial you can find about Lightwave networking and setups for rendering (I've even got a couple on my site). This will help you prepare for the trial ahead. Then, when your hardware is set up, and you can't get everything working, come back and ask for help :D

[renderingfarmer]

Great. Thanks for your responses. I'm gonna go read your tutorials right nyah.

[Johnny]

whatever happened to those bare-bones non-apple-brand G4 boxes?

J

[mlinde]

Originally posted by Johnny
whatever happened to those bare-bones non-apple-brand G4 boxes?

J
The company lost their license to purchase Apple parts, which they were useing to build the boxes.

[Ade]

Search the archives, there was a great post on PPC style renderfarms, we talked about yellow dog g4 briq's and blades u can buy.

[Ge4-ce]

It all depends on the money you have to spend.. but maybe now it's a good time to look at some lowpriced G4 systems.. Indeed, the eMac is cheap.. But not as fast as a Powermac. And it's not only the Mhz.. When you have a 1 Ghz eMac and a 1Ghz PowerMac.. The Powermac will render faster. Only problem is that they are more expensive and they do not come with a monitor. But you can allways switch monitors when setting them up. And from then, you won't need a monitor anymore..

At this moment you can buy a Powermac G4 1.25 Ghz single processor at about the same money an eMac costs. except for the monitor. And that machine has at least a 30% speed advantage because of the cache and clockspeed

[mlinde]

Originally posted by Ge4-ce
At this moment you can buy a Powermac G4 1.25 Ghz single processor at about the same money an eMac costs. except for the monitor. And that machine has at least a 30% speed advantage because of the cache and clockspeed
Well, I think $300 is a bit of a difference per machine. When you've got to get a KVM switch or two for every 3rd or fourth, that's an additional $100 (because you WILL need to use the monitor regularly, even in a render farm).

Four G4/1.25 + KVM + Monitor = $6000.
Six 1GHz eMacs = $6000.

Total processing power = 5 GHz v. 6 GHz and the slight gains from the cache and clockspeed won't make up for that. As the farm gets larger, the processing gains of the eMac would as well. 10:12, 20:24, etc.

The eMac takes less space, physically, so you can put more of them in a physical location. Ideally there will (someday) be a 1U rendering node style Mac, but without the expense of an xServe (more along the prices of the 1.25 GHz PowerMac). Don't need the server version of OS X, don't need the hardcore redundancy of a server, just need a 1U PowerMac.

[Ge4-ce]

Yeah.. you're probably right.. By the way.. You probably have to be very lucky to find cheap powermac G4 systems..

Emac's are probably the best solution