Renderama & Octacores

[Diego]

Hello to all,

I am making a 3DTV (Shutter Glasses) version for our "Lichmond" project, it is 50min HD animation work but now being a stereoscopic rendering it is a 100min!!! HD rendering.

For this reason I am trying to optimize my render farm, One of the problems is that in the 8-core slave computers I only can use 6 cameras, if I use 8 cameras then all cameras become slower. Even with 4 hard drives in the slave computer and two cameras for each hard drive the problem persist.

Would it make any difference if I make a partitions of the hard disks in order to have one partition for each camera?

Also wanted to know what type of network can accelerate the speed of data transference, Is there any card that can help in this?

Please any guidance regarding how to increase render farm capabilities will be welcome:)

Thanks in advance.

Cheers

Diego

[Arketype]

Hi Diego,

Open Activity Monitor and watch the disk activity tab to see how much throughput the drives are experiencing.

I have seen close to 200MB/s on 4 drive setups, but this is an extreme situation that I created with a test project designed to max-out the throughput of the drives. Partitioning will do nothing to help.

Also check to see if you are running close to the 2GB limit on each Camera, and how much total RAm you are using.

High resolution GI scenes can be very memory intensive. If your Cameras are low on memory they will likely pull a lot of data from the hard drive, making the drive access even worse.

Let us know how it's going.

Dave

[Juanxer]

I think a SSD could help there: a single unit usually goes beyond 200 MB/s., so getting a small sized one, say 64 GB, could be enough to hold 8 Camera Slaves running. You can install it inside the empty lower optical drive bay.

At work we've got a new Mac Pro Hexacore for DTV in which we've RAIDed a couple SSDs from OWC (they have a RAID-oriented variant which sets aside a bigger portion of the drives for housekeeping tasks): they give us about 400-500 GB/s. You could RAID0 a couple of small ones to reach that (they would consume two drive bays, though).

Could anyone lend you a SSD drive for you to do some testing?

[Diego]

Hi,

Yes, frames are generally quite close to the 2 GB on each Camera and disk activity is very high.

I'm going to buy a Mac Pro 12 cores with 24 GB Ram + 4 hard disk , I'll add a SSD 64 Gb as Juanxer said in the optical drive. when I get it I'll do some tests and share them here.

Up to 1.2 GB of RAM per frame, I can use all 8 cores with no problems, more than that starts to cause delays.

Thank you Dave and Juanxer,

Cheers

Diego

[Juanxer]

Which generation does your Octocore belong to? Latest models have SATA and power plugs right inside the optical drive bays. Older models need a standard internal SATA cable to be plugged into a socket in the motherboard and guide it into the optical bay. The oldest allow for two cables (so you could install both a hard drive and a SSD by using some adaptor bracket, or two SSDs for a RAID 0).

I put two SATA cables in my first generation Mac Pro quadcore. A bit troublesome, as one needs to slide the frontal fan out to be able to access the sockets and move the cables, and mine was a bit hard to remove. Later models use a screw that makes it simpler, but allow one cable only (the other is for the SATA DVD drive. Older Macs have IDE ones). As I said, latest models have the cabling already in place (at work, we put one SSD in the optical bay and the second into an Icy Dock box that conforms to the Mac Pro's drive trays.

You could take a look at Other World Computing's products: we were quite happy with their services, and they even have videoclips explaining how to install the products they distribute.

- Their range of SSDs: http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/internal_storage/Mercury_Extreme_SSD_Sandforce We went for the OWCs basically because of reviews such as this one: http://macperformanceguide.com/index_topics.html#cat_ssd

- Adapter brackets (including cables for older Mac Pros. Note that the Mac Pro's optical bay is not tall enough to fit two 3.5" HDs, but one 3.5" HD and a 2,5" SSD would fit OK): http://eshop.macsales.com/owcpages/multimount/multimount.html

- And an Icy Dock for installing 2.5" drives in a Mac Pro drive tray, if one can't be bothered with fiddling with all that or wants to do a RAID 0: http://eshop.macsales.com/item/IcyDock/MB882SP1S2B/

There are other distributors specializing in this kind of products, such as Newertech and so.

http://newertech.com/products/hddacc.php

[Diego]

Hola,

I spent the morning figuring out how to install an SSD Drive in to the optical bay. I have Octacores from the end of 2008, other from this year 2010 a Nehalem one, and the new one with two 6 Core “Westmere†processors.

Thank you very much for all this detailed information that saves me a lot of hours of research.

when I have the first results, I'll share it here to have a comparative.

Cheers

Diego

[Arketype]

Hi Diego,

Keep us updated!

Dave