Carrara Render Farm Using Single-Board Computers?

xenopticon

Has anyone tried building a networked render farm for Carrara, using single-board computers, such as the Latte Panda (which runs Win 10)?

Even with my twelve hyperthreads, I continue to hate waiting to see the results of my tweaks. If you've tried networked rendering with CPUs (or GPUs, for that matter), I'd be interesting in knowing what you've tried, how it worked, how you felt about the experience, what you learned, what to pursue/avoid.

Thanks--
X.
 

Dartanbeck

Here's a link to the beginning of a thread you might be interested in reading/joining. I wish I could answer with my own real data though! LOL Maybe one day!

jonstark had another thread going that he started before that one, but I can't seem to find it. It was all about his adventures in buying multi-core laptops 'on the cheap' from e-bay for use in establishing his own budget render farm. It's a cool thread. He ended up finding and buying a dual cpu HP Z600, as did Jay. Maybe there's a link to that thread somewhere in the one I linked to(?)

Either way, I hope it gives you some food for thought ;)

Jonstark

I'm probably blanking on something very obvious, but I don't know what 'single-board computer' means.  Are there computers that have more than one motherboard?  I've seen some dual-xeon workstations up on ebay that have a daughter card to run a 2nd cpu on the same computer, does the daughter card count as a 2nd motherboard?  Or maybe the term means something wildly different, I may be off on a wild tangent.

In my case, I was fairly recently (within the past year) been able to put together an inexpensive but very effective little render farm for network rendering in Carrara.  The regular 'unlocked' version of Carrara pro allows for up to 20 cores of rendering theoretically, but actually it's even better than that as the lockout really seems only to apply to when you're using more than one computer.  If you have a dual Xeon workstation as your main machine, then even without unlocking it I believe it will allow you to use nearly all the cores (the reason I say 'nearly' is that someone recently posted a thread talking about a super computer they had which had like 64 cores but they seemed to be running into an upper limit of what Carrara would allow them to use around 48 cores or so, my memory is a little fuzzy so I may be getting that a bit wrong).

Currently my main workstation is a dual-xeon z620 which has 32 cores, and it uses all 32 cores no problemo.  I also have Grid which unlocks Carrara for more cores when network rendering with additional computers in the render farm, and I've three other dual-xeon workstations (a pair of z620's and a lenovo d20) and I can network render with up to 100 cores total.  I do have some other computers and laptops but no matter what I do I can't seem to get more than 100 cores when rendering no matter how many other computers I tie into the render farm for network rendering, so I'm assuming 100 cores is the upper limit.

BTW I should mention I was able to get all these dual-xeon workstations dirt cheap simply by watching eBay, in fact I was stunned how inexpensive they were.  5 years ago I would have been paying $5000 to $7000 each, and each of these I got for less than $150.  The reason why (I theorize) is that large businesses simply replace their older inventory workstations with the latest/greatest/most expensive and are just looking to get rid of perfectly good older models.  They'll put up a ton of the same model without caring what time of the day/night the auction will close, and most normal consumers aren't on the lookout to pick these kinds of computers up anyway, so the only competition is from other businesses.  So while most of the normal consumer audience is searching for a pc with an i7, they aren't at all looking for a dual-Xeon, or even aware of it.  And of the ebay auction closes outside of business hours (as many of them do) and if there's a ton of the same model all on sale at the same time, it means there is very little competition driving up prices.  The funny thing is not only are these dual-Xeon monsters perfect for Carrara (or any other CPU rendering), you can put any modern video card in them you want, and render for example Octane just as well as the much more expensive latest generation i7 desktop.  I hooked up an Oculus to my z620 and can play high-detail VR video games whenever I want, for example.  There's no downside and tons of upside to these babies lol.

It should be mentioned though that in order to network render in Carrara you have to use the batch queue.  This means you need to save the scene as a carrara file, then load it in the batch queue and launch there, otherwise you won't be able to take advantage of the full network and you'll only be rendering with however many cores you have on your main workstation.

Dartanbeck

I just found this wonderful article

How to Build your own Render Farm -  Ars Technica 

Mistara

16 cores should help!

Chris Fox Art

i did network rendering in the past with my i7 920 Desktop PC and my i7 Workstation Notebook but that has killed my Fan from Notebook lol

I now use octane renderer for Carrara as it's GPU based and much much much faster than the CPU based internal renderer from Carrara. That's what i would go for.

Dartanbeck

Chris Fox Art said:

i did network rendering in the past with my i7 920 Desktop PC and my i7 Workstation Notebook but that has killed my Fan from Notebook lol

Yeah... I knew from when I cooked my Carrara laptop that, when I'm rendering, those cores run wide-freaking-open for hours and hours getting those animations through the batch queue.

So when I built my new (then) Carrara machine, I built it into a very nice tower with plentiful cooling intake and exhaust ports. Even running then wide open for days, my cores never overheat. Makes me happy. All of my intakes are filtered, so it's easy to keep the innards clean and shiny, which helps too.

That was quite some time ago and that machine is still rendering well. But I still want to get more cores to play with!

Chris Fox Art

If i could get a workstation for rendering i would also go for a System with Dual CPU, 2x i7 980Xtreme (6 core processor) + a nvidia Quadro GP100, that would be good enough for CPU and GPU rendering with Carrara but that would be an expensive fun.
Right now i've still got my 2x GTX 560ti oc and i am a bit worried sometimes that i will smoke them when rendering takes too long with octane.

Jonstark

One thing I've done to keep things getting too hot (beside lots of fans for cooling) is to change the settings in windows so that my maximum processor runs at 99% (it's set at 100% use by default).  Mkes no noticeable difference to render speeds, but keeps the processor ever from being taxed at full 100% use.