Mini Render Farm (PIC)
 

Just showing off this little render farm (G5 cluster) I built to improve video compression speeds.

Apple has a great program called Qmaster which allows you to team lot's of macs together into one super computer.

http://www.stockimagelab.com/post/Render_farm.JPG

That looks awesome & expensive.

very nice, I hope you added a A/C duct into that closet. I haven't done a lot of video editing but I used to do a lot of 3d work and I know rendering is a bitch.. Would have loved to have had that set up back then.

what kind of improvements are you seeing in terms of render times?

does it help encoding times too?

Jealousy is rearing it's ugly head here. :1orglaugh

Sweet.. give us some stats comparisons on speeds and such :)

that looks so expensive

Ditto that. overheating would suck in there.

With the prices of your average x86 hardware and linux you could build that cluster for prolly 1/5th of what you spent for that cluster. Regardless, it looks awesome, congrats :D

Great setup hope you have a way to exhaust the heat.
Congrats :thumbsup

looks like a sweet setup...
i hope it's cooled enough...

I have 2 vents in the closet and the door stays open all the time.

These 7 macs are in addition to the other G5's and other macs on desks in the office.

There are 10 machines in the farm.

2 weeks of encoding now takes just over 48 hours. It was the speed improvement we needed.

God damn, very nice

wow...nice setup

porn never had it so good :winkwink:

wow ! thats awesome !

There goes 20k ?

Damn.

Very nice lookin

I seriously read this thread title as "Mini Reindeer Farms (PIC)".

Looks like a really nice setup you have there. What are you using it for? Rendering HD video with FC, some Shake jobs or something completely different?

Just started to take a look at the Qmaster manual...

Mainly for Compressor encoding. It helps with HD but it's also a big help when you have thousands of hours of video to compress into many clips in different formats. It essentially breaks each vid up into as many equal parts as you have machines and let's each one process that chunk, the management app does all the work of splitting it up and re-assembling it.

They are on a gigabit switch and each one has 2 gigabit NIC's connected maximizing throughput between machines.

That looks awesome :)
WG

what a fucking serious setup!

Very Nice, how much did it all run you?

That's exactly what I would need right now... if it wasn't for the lack of money... damn! :1orglaugh

Is that one of the smaller Linksys switches I see there? Does it support jumbo-frames?
If you have an isolated network you might want to try switching to bigger packets (9000 instead of 1500), as it may give you quite a performance boost, depending on your application. Just my :2 cents:

:1orglaugh :1orglaugh Me too!

I was thinking "Cool pics of mini reindeer! Let me check that out."

QTbucks_Mark

That is a Linksys gigabit switch, the network traffic is not too bad because the compression process is slower than the network.

I will try the packet size change tho ;) thanks

Very nice Brad.

hahahah that's awesoem

Looking good Howard Hughes!

http://www.aeroclubsocal.org/images/howard_hughes.jpg

DH

very very cool but seems like overkill for porn do you do mainstream also?

awesome setup, i do hope u have enough cooling system in place

:smokin

:thumbsup Thats wicked man

wow man, great work!

that's what i'm thinkin' . . heat baby . . . oh yeah . .

that's a combined gazillion gigahertz! :thumbsup

Dayyuumm that shits pimp !! :pimp

looks nice

Impressive. Would work great for rendering 3D animations as well. :thumbsup

Damn that looks sweet