Compressor/Shake render station

[gunleik]

Hi.

Because of other stuff (like BM-Card and RAID + legacy software) I'll be G5 based for quite a while still, but the idea of dropping my shake renders and compressor outputs on another computer is quite tempting. My only reservation is network throughput and configuration.

What I'm thinking now is to get the standard config 2.66 with 4 gigs of RAM and just stuff it in a corner for some calculations, But, will I really need two of these machines to run this smoothly? One to controll the queue and one to handle the calculations?

And is the standard gig ethernet fast enough? Any thoughts?

Gunleik

 

[MikeCurtis]

I was surprised at how inefficient network compression was without very careful configuation - reading/writing to/from same drive nukes performance. The ratio of file size/transfer speed as compared to how computer intensive per frame what you're doing is will have a significant effect on how well it works. Somewhere somewhen I linked to some guy's thorough testing of making a small render setup.

For bang/$, I'd at least consider an Intel Mini loaded up with enough RAM - does the GPU matter much for your final renders?

-mike

 

[gunleik]

So the idea is:

One mini to "deliver the job" and one mini to administrate the job to my one computer cluster -?

I will put in the x1900 card in the tower for later use and stuff it with disks, but I'll be sending the gig wia gig ethernet from my main G5 based RAID config.

I also have plenty of FW-800 cabinets that I could render the files out to, for easy sneaker-networking back to the main station.

AFAIK neither Compressor, nor Shake/qmaster uses the GPU for anything usefull.

The issue is shake file-out nodes (mostly animation codec) and compressor deliveries (uncompressed SD/HD mostly, but h.264, wmv and flv, too.)

What I need is to get more working time out of my main station and not clog my workflow with rendertime.

I guess I could get almost twice as much work done if I could offload the render tasks and final output to a different station. For editing I'll hold off to the next gen towers, but for other tasks I need more power right now...

BTW, does the mini have gig ethernet?

I have no free pci-x slots in my G5, so another network connection is not an issue on this interrim system.

Gunleik