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You might be better off using EC2 or similar. Do the work to configure everything once and package it as an AMI, then when you need your swarm, spin up as many

You might be better off using EC2 or similar. Do the work to configure everything once and package it as an AMI, then when you need your swarm, spin up as many instance as you need, render whatever needs rendered, and then turn off the instances. Should be reasonably cheap, and it'll let you decide on the speed vs cost tradeoff (i.e. more servers cost more, but will get your work done faster; fewer servers cost less, but will take longer). I don't think a rack full of hardware is a very good choice for this.

mentos 9y ago
I will probably try my luck with one of these X1 instances https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/x1/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/x1/ Only fear is that the time/cost it takes to spool up/down would not let us iterate as fast as ideally possible if we owned the hardware and had it running 24/7 for dedicated just in time use. So rather than rent an X1 instance indefinitely we might just pony up the $ upfront and buy our own. "Each X1 instance is powered by four Intel® Xeon® E7 8880 v3 (codenamed Haswell) processors and offers up to 128 vCPUs." Anyone know if the X1 instance is 1 motherboard with 4 sockets or 2 separate mobos with 2?
- cweagans 9y ago
  The time to spin up is on the order of seconds. IMO, if your core competency isn't sourcing and buying hardware in order to build render farms, you shouldn't do it. It's just not worth it. AWS brings a lot of value to the table, not the least of which is the fact that you won't have to maintain/fix hardware when you're just trying to render something. If the instance is broken, you can just kill it and spin up a new one. Seriously, this will make your life so much easier. > Anyone know if the X1 instance is 1 motherboard with 4 sockets or 2 separate mobos with 2? This shouldn't matter. It's abstracted away from you by design.

mentos 9y ago

I will probably try my luck with one of these X1 instances https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/x1/ https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/instance-types/x1/ Only fear is that the time/cost it takes to spool up/down would not let us iterate as fast as ideally possible if we owned the hardware and had it running 24/7 for dedicated just in time use. So rather than rent an X1 instance indefinitely we might just pony up the $ upfront and buy our own. "Each X1 instance is powered by four Intel® Xeon® E7 8880 v3 (codenamed Haswell) processors and offers up to 128 vCPUs." Anyone know if the X1 instance is 1 motherboard with 4 sockets or 2 separate mobos with 2?

cweagans 9y ago
The time to spin up is on the order of seconds. IMO, if your core competency isn't sourcing and buying hardware in order to build render farms, you shouldn't do it. It's just not worth it. AWS brings a lot of value to the table, not the least of which is the fact that you won't have to maintain/fix hardware when you're just trying to render something. If the instance is broken, you can just kill it and spin up a new one. Seriously, this will make your life so much easier. > Anyone know if the X1 instance is 1 motherboard with 4 sockets or 2 separate mobos with 2? This shouldn't matter. It's abstracted away from you by design.