Re: [Condor-users] Condor for a renderfarm

[Preston Smith <psmith@xxxxxxxxxx>]

There's many folks who've used Condor for rendering, it's very well  
suited for it.

I'm sure somebody from Cycle Computing may chime in, they have a lot  
of experience in this..

We (Purdue) have the TeraDRE available to TeraGrid users:   http://teradre.rcac.purdue.edu/
Indiana University has RenderPortal that is used by their students:    http://www.avl.iu.edu/?RenderPortal


-Preston

On Aug 5, 2009, at 7:33 PM, Campbell Barton wrote:

> 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
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