Mac OS X Render Farm

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Level 4

1,000 points

Mac OS X Render Farm

I need to setup a render farm that supports the following applications:

Adobe After Effects, Final Cut Pro, Motion, Shake, Houdini, Modo, Maya, Cinema4D and Compressor.

What would I need?

Does Xgrid support these apps or is the Sun Grid Engine a better bet?

Sun Engine Grid
http://gridengine.sunsource.net/

XSan is a must unless ZFS is a better option not too sure if it would be compatible though. What RAID arrays would work best? Can I use the Sun StorageTek 6140 array with the XServe being that XRaid is no defunct (Promise RAID looks iffy, not to mention ugly).

How would I manage the Queues (Can I run multiple Queue Applications to support different apps i.e. Apple Qmaster and Sun Grid Engine)?

RUSH http://www.seriss.com/rush/
Dr. Queue http://drqueue.org/cwebsite/
Qube http://www.pipelinefx.com/

Anyone with experience.

Thanks,
Juan

8 Core Mac Pro 3ghz, Mac OS X (10.5.2), 8GB DDR RAM 250GB HDD

Posted on May 16, 2008 8:15 PM

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Answer 1

varjak paw

Level 10

182,668 points

May 19, 2008 8:56 AM in response to Juan M

First, I strongly recommend that you do not use ZFS on any Mac OS X production system or server. Though it shows a lot of promise for future Mac OS X installations, it's still very much in the experimental stage at this time.

As to the apps, the Final Cut Suite and Shake do not use Xgrid that I know of. They have their own distributed processing system, called Qmaster. You can download and read the manual here (clicking this link will display or download a PDF file). Maya, if I'm understanding correctly, also can use Qmaster. Some tips can be found here. I don't believe that AfterEffects on Mac offer distributed rendering. Don't know about Houdini, Modo and Cinema4D.

Message was edited by: Dave Sawyer

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Answer 2

Juan M Author

Level 4

1,000 points

May 19, 2008 4:23 PM in response to varjak paw

Well I mentioned ZFS mainly because the Sun StorageTek Array supports ZFS and XSAN looks somewhat similar to ZFS in that the storage is pooled. I imagine Apple is planning on replacing XSAN with ZFS in the not too distant future, if so Sun Storage looks great!

Regarding Qmaster, I'm going to investigate further. Its supposed to work according to Apple's advertising:

Clusters for encoding and rendering
Q Master

Qmaster uses the processing capacity of your network computers for a wide range of tasks, including encoding and rendering for motion graphics produced by applications *such as Apple Shake, Adobe After Effects, and Autodesk Maya.* Configure Qmaster clusters to run jobs for encoding, rendering, or both, and change the configuration in a few simple steps. You can output files faster than ever by configuring clusters to take advantage of multiple processors, or “services,” as well as multiple computers. For even faster throughput, configure Qmaster to manage individual processors in each computer, turning any Mac Pro into a virtual render farm. To further optimize your workflow, create clusters to be used for specific jobs, users, or applications.

http://appleclub.com.hk/finalcutstudio/compressor/encoding.html

Modo seems to have network rendering built in as well. Still waiting for the Mac version of Houdini to test it out. I've also have been playing with Real Flow.

I'll keep updating the post if I find anything.

Thanks,
Juan

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