Render Farms and Parallel Computing

[Vince Petaccio]

Hey guys,

n00b here. ]

So, I've been trying to absorb as much information as humanly possible about workflows and technical stuff, so I can get back to the "good stuff" (making good films) without worrying about the "toys" (equipment, software, bla bla bla).

So, what I'm wondering now is, do any of you guys use multiple "blades" in your render farms? If so, how does this work? What do you use for a queue manager? I've been doing some reading on "generalized" ideas behind render farms, but I guess now I'm looking for specifics.

In case it's important, I'm working in FCS 2.0.

Thanks ]
-Vince

 

[Bob Gruen]

Blade computers are a type of computer while render farms are application clusters (groups of computers that have software that work in concert).

For example, a blade system often has daughterboards that have 4 CPUs and 4 memory blocks each. Each daughterboard can only run one OS, but an OS can span several daughterboards. Therefore, you can then build a server in your blade system by adding multiple, similarly configured daughterboards to a given computer definition, then install an OS and you are up and running. You can run up to 4 CPUs on a single daughterboard, but adding a 5th will require an additional daughterboard to be added.

A cluster is several computers that have a service running that will work together to perform a given task. I wrote a Bash script that can run on several computers (Mac OS X or Linux) that will apply color correction to DPX or TIFF files. So I can use Redline on a Mac workstation to extract the DPX or TIFF files, then four different computers will grab original frames and apply the color correction values, saving the new files on the same Mac workstation.

The clustering software delivered by Apple is called QMaster, and it drives Compressor. Now that Apple is supporting R3D file processing it may make sense to add Color to QMaster's capability (if it hasn't been already).

Bob