Rendering Power

[riley_ag]

what type of setup do you guys have for network rendering?

for modeling we have two machines with 128mb geforce4's and then about 5 machines ranging from 700mhz-2.4ghz. I brought my desktop down to our workstation and have my laptop to work from home, and we should have a nice array come rendertime. hopefully something close to 15-20 pretty powerful machines:D

How bout you guys

[Soukup]

1x dual athlon Mp 1.67 ghz with a gforce 4 ti 4200 and 512 ddr

1x dual xeon? maybe not sure yet

2x more computers with 512 ddr and gforce 3-4?

2x 700 mhz with 384 sdram

1x 700 mhz with 128 ddr

plus a couple of surprises hopefully from haworth.

this is a rough guess but matt and chris will probably correct me on the specs of their computers

[RobDeCotiis]

beat this..
23 workstations with these specs
Intel Xeon 2.0 ghz
1 gb 533 mhz rdram
64 mb video cards
2 x 40 gb hard drives

rendering is going to fly.

[Soukup]

Originally posted by RobDeCotiis
beat this..
23 workstations with these specs
Intel Xeon 2.0 ghz
1 gb 533 mhz rdram
64 mb video cards
2 x 40 gb hard drives

rendering is going to fly.

but how complex will our scenes be. man if we had that kind of power we'd raytrace everyting and jack up the polygon count...just for fun.

p.s. how did you get that kind of power...school bought or sponsor bought?

[MBiddy]

Oh yeah? Look what we have so far. Beat THIS!

450 mhz Pentium II with 256 mb RAM

233 mhz (I think) Pentium-something and I don't know the other specs.

Ha!

[Rob Colatutto]

stock dell p4 1.6ghz w/128mb pc 133, 16mb ati rage card


my autocad computer on the otherhand..... 1ghz p3, 384mb pc133, dual ati radeons for 2 monitors and a tv

[Yan Wang]

1x AMD w/Water Cooling

3dMark2001SE Score: 11995

[AJ Quick]

Yeah, I think we have like 1 bad system in the 500mhz range. ;)

[RobDeCotiis]

p.s. how did you get that kind of power...school bought or sponsor bought?

My school got a new computer lab over the summer.. we put an addition on and they decided "what the heck, lets get some kickin' computers", so they got those.. :) yesterday i finally got an "OK" from my mentor to use those comps for netrendering.. even tho i've been bugging him since the first day of school.. AHHHHHHHHHHHHH 23 XEON 2GHZ w/ 1 gb of rdram AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

raytrace wont be a problem
who cares about polygons?
motion blur? ha we dont have to fake it anymore
oh yeah, we can use all those inventor models i've made over the years too.. :)

[Specialagentjim]

Originally posted by RobDeCotiis
My school got a new computer lab over the summer.. we put an addition on and they decided "what the heck, lets get some kickin' computers", so they got those.. :) yesterday i finally got an "OK" from my mentor to use those comps for netrendering.. even tho i've been bugging him since the first day of school.. AHHHHHHHHHHHHH 23 XEON 2GHZ w/ 1 gb of rdram AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

raytrace wont be a problem
who cares about polygons?
motion blur? ha we dont have to fake it anymore
oh yeah, we can use all those inventor models i've made over the years too.. :)

Me thinks old robby boy there outta be letting other teams use his "mad lab skillz" ;) heh, wadda ya think there?

If not...don't be surprised if the south florida teams hunt your school down and the comps are magically gone later....The broward school system dosent exactly lend itself to allow us to buy jacked up machines.. :(

[Jeremy_Mc]

8 x 1.8 GHz Pentium 4's - main render farm for raytracing and fancy envrionment fx
16 x 667 MHz Pentium 3's - secondary render farm for rendering test scenes and simple renders
1 x 1.4 GHz Athlon - used as a controller for back burner and some modelling
1 x 900 MHz Athlon - used as another controller/modelling machine

this should be fun... :)

*jeremy

[Matt VP]

The parts for my new computer should be here today.

-Dual Athlon MP 2100
-Dual 60GB 7200RPM, RAID 0
-Radeon 9700 Pro
-512mb Crucial PC2100 DDR ECC Registered

I'll get some pictures of it when it's built.

[PyroPhin]

between 24 and 50 new dell Workstatons.. 1.4 Ghz 256 RAM and 64 mg video

Mmmmm... being a Sysadmin for your school has it's perks ^.^

[BobPg3]

I’ve got u all beat!

Duel 1Ghz Processor
2GB DDR Ram
4 120GB Hard Drives
NVIDIA GeForce4 Titanium 128Mb DDR Ram
Gigabit Ethernet

All of that times 42 = a whole LOT of rendering.

[Matt VP]

Well, the HD's aren't going to help you, and dual 1GHz is kind of outdated.

On a side note: how the hell did you get 42 of those suckers?

And what type of GF4 titanium? There are 5 different types now.

ti4200, ti4200 8x, ti4400, ti4600, ti4600 8x(ti4800)

[Soukup]

no matter what matt, he still has our both of our dual mp's in beat.

that should be some mighty fine rendering they got though.

[ditritus]

We didn't use all of them, but we did have 50 x P4 2.26 GHz available.

Now since BobPg3 was bragging about hard drives, I just have to let you know: we had 575 GB of space available, on our school network's P: drive, made exclusively for us! :p

My box is:
Black Cheiftec Aluminum case with a window preinstalled
Antec TruePower 430W
Athlon XP 2100+
Asus A7N8X (nForce2)
512MB DDR333
Western Digital 80GB (8MB Buffer! WOOT!)
GF4 Ti4200 64MB
*drumroll please* Hitachi Superscan Elite 21" monitor!

I've only had it two months... when I get some more money, I'm going to be modding so much, this baby's gonna purr....
... loudly... 4x 55 dB fans.

[Specialagentjim]

Alrighty, after a meeting with Tom Mitchell (Dell's State of Florida Education rep), who is btw a great guy, we've got 26 machines coming in with these specs: Dual Xeon 2.4 ghz 512k on-die cache FSB 533 (I think thats the FSB...), 1 gig of DDR, 40 gig and 120gig HDs, ATI Fire 64 Meg video cards (I made them redo the quote 3 times to get a CAD-class video card :p ), Gigabit network cards, DVD+RW drives (okay..so that was just a brag...), and 19" CRTs for all of them coming in. Those are all for the visual computer modeling class (which btw, with a class like that, can someone please explain WHY I did the animation mostly by myself???)

We're also getting 53 p4 2.2 ghz machines for the proggramming lab and electronics lab..but im thinking of installing hte max server renderer on tehm as a service, and render overnight on those when no one's using them.

Also, we're getting 3 Dell PowerEdge 2650 servers. Two are going to run my Windows 2000 Active Directory Services and one is going to be an application server. Ill probobly deploy the backburner manager to that also.

Then, we're getting a Network Attached Storage Device with 3 146 gig hard drives, SCSI 320, all raided together. With any luck at all, this will also be on a gigabit network (we also have fiber optics running through our entire building).

So yeah...thats what I'm up to...

(Btw...our plans for this building got soo cool, that our reps started bringing their friends from the office to our meetings to see what we're doing...)


All i have to say is : :D

[Specialagentjim]

Originally posted by PyroPhin
Mmmmm... being a Sysadmin for your school has it's perks ^.^

My sentiments exactly (see my previous post)

[RobDeCotiis]

:( i didnt do animation this year because i was too busy building the bot.. the kid that was in charge of animation didn't get it done :( too bad.. maybe next year they'll make a nice anim on time.. :-/ o well...

X_x all those xeons go to waste!

[Specialagentjim]

Originally posted by RobDeCotiis
X_x all those xeons go to waste!

I dont think so! Those things will be cooking 24/7. Not to mention, if I follow a good timeline, hopefully I'll have animation done ahead of time, and maybe I can help the teams without that kinda equipement get theirs rendered a lil faster

[RobDeCotiis]

no no no.. my school's setup.. we didnt get our anim finished...

[Specialagentjim]

Ohhh, sorry, thought you were crackin on my incoming machines

[Chris Nowak]

hehe...we thought we might have been able to use the schools computers for a little rendering, they are all P4s with 256 ram and GForce 2 MX. However, we looked at the way they were set up and realized that we wouldnt be able to use them after all. Has anyone seen Deep Freeze? It allocates a small portion of the hard drive to be saved when you shut off, everything else gets set back to a certain template when you reboot. Well, these computers had 40gb hard drives....and only 100 megs of "thaw" space (space that didnt get erased)....so there was no way to install anything at all on these decent systems....nor any way to save any decent size file onto them.