G5+Xserve clusters? Possible PPC renderfarm?

[Ade]

Guys I want to start getting some serious rendering speeds at an affordable price.


Some questions -
Can Linux LW renderer be run on PPC platforms?
What are other similar render clusters on the pc side cost?
Would the clusters be noisey?
Do they come with any display cards or strickley MUST be activated by server techniques like remote desktop access?

Has anyone else found alternative PPC clusters?
Has anyone had experience with xserves in rendering enviroments?

[Beamtracer]

"Can Linux LW renderer be run on PPC platforms?"
I don't believe so. I understand this is because the byte order is different. This will probably rule out running it on IBM's forthcoming Linux PPC970 boxes.


"What are other similar render clusters on the pc side cost?"
Dancing with the devil? ;)


Don't forget that a render farm is a different thing to a cluster. Lightwave can control multiple machines in a render farm, but it can't cluster.

[Ade]

What is the difference then? I thought a cluster was a mac without stuff like optic drives and display cards?

[mlinde]

Originally posted by Ade
Guys I want to start getting some serious rendering speeds at an affordable price.

Ade, if you want to stick with a mac environment, and get lots of rendering power cheap, you have basically two options. You can load up on eMacs (~$950 each with 512MB RAM) or you can look for older model G4s on eBay, business auctions, reseller closeouts, and other outlets. The XServe is a bit hefty for a render node, weighing in at over $2000 to get just one.

[Beamtracer]

Ah, but in a few months the G5 Xserve will be out. It'll toast a whole room full of iMacs. It'll toast any Windows boxes as well!!!

[mlinde]

First of all, if I remember my technology correctly, a "cluster" essentially takes a number of machines and converts them into one big processor.

I don't believe this is the most effective use of a group of machines, since individually there is less overhead and more data processing than when configured as a cluster. If you were rendering one massive single image file, a cluster would be your tool, for animations or sequences, a network render is a better system.

Beam, although the G5 XServe may be available sometime before the end of the year, look at the price/performance ratio, and it doesn't beat out a network render farm of eMacs. For each dual processor XServe you would have 4 (maybe 5) eMacs in your render farm. In addition, you wouldn't have the added costs of setting up a rack with KVM switches and a monitor. Why would you buy a single $3500 rendering machine when you can have 5? Even with the expected speed improvements over the G4, you still get more processing power for your dollar with an eMac render farm than a single XServe, especially since the G5 Xserve doesn't even exist yet.

I don't care if Apple is trying to market it as a clustered Shake rendering machine, the output is far different than the normal Lightwave user -- Shake is most often used to produce 2K film images, and at that resolution you can be looking at the advantages of a clustered render node to get your single frames output in an hour instead of a day, and at feature film budgets that becomes possible, if not practical.

[Zarathustra]

Ya gotta love Beam's optimism!

mlinde is right, again - look for old G4s and get some ram and upgrade cards (prices continuing to fall).
Last year I got a G4 off Ebay, bought ram, 1ghz card for it and dual ghz card for my primary mac all for less then I would have paid for a new Mac.

[fxgeek]

It's a pity they don't make a PPC linux renderer because this would make a great cluster(er)

http://www.alias.com/eng/login/discussions/discussions_login.jhtml?NextPage=14@@.ef3eac6

I know it's low powered but look how many of them you can get into a rack!!!

http://www.terrasoftsolutions.com/products/briQ/server.shtml

(little bit expensive though)

The X-Serve cluster node is not bad value for money, and should be even better value when they stick two g5's in them