[Condor-users] Condor for a renderfarm

[Campbell Barton <ideasman42@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi there, (first post here)
I'm looking at options for running a renderfarm with Blender3D.

The last renderfarm I setup used sungrid but was far too complicated
to manage IMHO.
http://www.bigbuckbunny.org/index.php/our-renderfarm-and-how-it-works/

I have seen a post that shows condor has been used with blender before
but would like to know how condor goes with larger filesets.
ref: http://blenderartists.org/forum/archive/index.php/t-102226.html

Details
- all local PCs (our own renderfarm this time :) )
- Modifying blender to better work with condor is acceptable, or
building against other libs.
- only needs to run blender.
- renderfarm will be 10-20 quad core PC's, all the same hardware.
- Linux 64bit.
- 4-16gig of ram
- Condors suspend/resume/migration isn't important to us.
- Animation will be split up into one job per frame, shot would be
roughly 100-1000 frames.
- ~30min per frame
- For rendering a frame each node will need to load around 1-2gb over
a gigabit (maybe 10gigabit) network. each frame will be between
20-80mb.
- Rendering takes up so much ram that I don't think it can be done on
idle workstations (maybe overnight on artists workstations)

Does this seem like a good use for condor?

- Is there any linux distro that is better suited for condor? (was
thinking centos/debian)
- Is the data that needs to be read for each frame likely to be a
problem (assuming that normal file copy isn't prohibitively slow).
- Has anyone here used condor for a renderfarm before? is there any
advice you can give?

If I don't use condor or a similar system Ill probably hack together a
python script that runs the jobs over ssh, since we're not dealing
with 100's of jobs running at once its not so complicated.
just wanted to get a feel for weather this is something condor is well
suited for.

Thanks!
-- 
- Campbell