Lovenote Digital 20 processor render farm - "Dashcat2"

I've been working on building a renderfarm since September of 2009. This currect incarnation has been in the works since February 2010 in my spare time. It's got: 20x AMD Opteron 275 Dual-core processors, 35GB RAM, 1600GB hard disk space across the ten render nodes with Dual Opteron 275 Dual-core CPUs in the server with 8GB RAM dedicated to that. I don't have hard disks installed in the server yet.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• renderfarm
• render farm
• supercomputer
• Linux NetworX
• HardOCP
• dashcat
• dashcat2
• Lovenote Digital
• cgi

[94thts]

How much faster does it render than say a regular high end desktop? :)

[LovenoteDigital]

@94thts

The render speed of the whole thing is about the same as two fully decked out Mac Pro machines. This is on six year old technology, though.

[cepomwa]

How do you do for the electricity bill? =)

[LovenoteDigital]

@cepomwa - It's not bad in Winter here, but I fear summer time.

[engineerisaac]

beacuse its a render farm you should install deepfreeze to each node so you can just cut the power and a image will restore on boot.

[LovenoteDigital]

@engineerisaac - I had never even heard of deepfreeze before you mentioned it. I'm going to have to look into this. Thanks for the tip.

[Geoxile]

So what keeps you from using a mainstream desktop CPU?

[redbook5544332211]

Could you please put up a tutorial because I do 3d animating and thise would really help

[compdude47]

@LovenoteDigital I imagine you don't have to turn the heat on in Winter :D

[LovenoteDigital]

@DVmaker - I'm at kind of a standstill since Winter hit here in Utah. While I've been able to work on some of the software side of things, the hardware is stuck in place until the ground thaws since I bought a second shed to house the render farm and need to run electrical service and data lines to it. Waiting really is the hardest part right now.