The 9GHz Rendiathon

www.bit-tech.net/article/141

 

Wow that is amazingly cool!

I bow down to the guy who created it, 75% increase in speed is certainly a good thing

 

Its not very often that a mod or similar makes me take notice but a round of applause to this guy - great idea, well-executed. Well done

*n

 

So how is the rendering job actually completed? What technically is happening during this process?

/knows nothing about 'super' computers

 

I imagine that once the 'thing' is ready to be rendered(hmm) that his pc splits up the task into chunks and sends it off to all available pc, i.e. his monster, and then once they are dopne they are sent back and stuck together. Probably a bit like SETI.

Really is an impressive project though, excellently executed.

 

This is pure brilliance! 75% increase for £500!

BTW, is the network rendering a special feature of the software he's using, or can you do it with most multi-threaded programs? It would be so useful to offload work from your computer to another when mp3 ripping or whatever.

I thought you had to write your own software, and make a beowulf cluster to do this sort of thing!





ch424

 

That is incredibly cool, a personal rendering farm, at such a low cost!
Could be nice with a second article about the software, I simply love clustering

\\Balder

 

With most highend 3d packages (3dsmax, maya, softimage etc) you can setup network rendering, some have it included but you can also buy software thats made specifically for it. So when you've finished working on your 3d scene and you want it to render, the software will send all the content files (scene files, texture maps etc) to each computer and then set them rendering. You could have 5 computers working on one frame each or have all five computers rendering out a 5th of a frame.

Big graphics houses like Pixar and ILM have have massive render farms with something like 500+ CPUs each with 4gig of ram and terabytes of storage, and then at night when everyones gone home all the office computers are assigned rendering tasks too.

Martin

 

Cheers for the explanation

 

Nice, I was suprised with how small it ended up for 5 computers.

 

Yeah, thanks for the explanation Martin

ch424

 

Now use it to join the Bit-tech folding@home team our number is 33346.

 

great mod.


Nice to see a project with a proper purpose for once other than looking spiffy (tho it looks spiffy as well )

 

how does it work ? does it just grab cpu power from the network ?


dont spose there would be a way of implementing this into some sort of games playing machine does anything need to be set on the hdd ? apart from the OS, or do you need the software installed for them to group process?

 

Doesnt work like that look at the post above, the image/animation to be rendered is split up amongst the machines, they finish their bit and transfer the result back to the 'master' which puts all the pieces together. Reminds me of the Screamernet system built into lightwave on meh Amiga...

Quality project too

 

Its bloody fantastic thats what i can tell you , but as others have mentioned...how the hell does it actually work? i always thought that you needed to create a beowulf cluster . It would be fantastic to find out because ive been eyein up a couple of nano-itx boards (when they finally are out) that i would love to cluster together in one case (nano-itx boards are complete systems on a mobo thats 9cmx9cm large!)

 

Wow lol Very nice, This can be good for gaming servers
5 servers in 1 package

Btw, imageine if it was watercooling lol

 

Great Build!

I too would like to know more. How does the remote console work? Do you VPN into the different machines?

Could it be used for other things too? (Surely one board could be an apache server, one a mySQL, and for ftp/data etc etc)

A++ mod!

 

Hmmm...Coolermaster Stacker...Removable Hard Disk Caddies...Nano-ITX blade!!!

 

Even one of those machine will be MORE THAN CAPABLE of handling, apache, mysql, php, fileserving and ftp ...