Looking back on an old thread I decided to work out a way to reliably use SheepIt-Renderfarm with Amazon EC2, and came up with a small script that doesn’t require you to use ssh/terminal access to any of the Amazon instances, and uses the latest SheepIt client as well. Post here:
https://www.sheepit-renderfarm.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=589&p=3064#p3064
Here is a video rendering across 10 c4.8xlarge instaces, about USD $0.37/hour/instance, which are 16 core machines.
Here’s the script, it uses Amazons cloud-init system to insert the script at instance launch.
#!/bin/bash
#Place your Sheepit username in quotes below, and either your password or an account key.
USERNAME="zeealpal"
PASSWORD="ogGriv5XOArgCwsUPyTdAFU7bO43MeJ6vwtnRMnW"
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:thomas-schiex/blender -y
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install libglu1-mesa libsm-dev blender default-jre -y
wget http://sheepit-renderfarm.com/media/applet/client-latest.php -O sheepit.jar
nohup java -jar sheepit.jar -login $USERNAME -password $PASSWORD -ui text >/dev/null 2>&1 &