Beowulf Cluster - is it possible to make homemade render farm?

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1

Times are changing and needs too. Today’s projects are more complicated than those which people used to create years ago. That means stronger hardware is needed (thank you captain obvious!).

I have at home 4 PCs and 1 laptop. Some are worth more or less. New and old machines. If I could “combine” them into one in LAN network I would achieve pretty good computing power. From what I heard it’s possible to combine computers in a way that each machine is rendering specified frame. So lets say in 10h one could render 1000 frames and other 300 (I guess this is how it works). I think with beowulf cluster it should be faster. And difference is significant.

Is it possible to use blender at the moment in such way and if not then developing that kind of feature would be challenging?

2

the extra overhead would be horrible in terms of render performance.

it would be much easier / faster / simpler / better results to go with a standard render farm system. network them all together, have a common mounted directory on all computers, render to the same folder with placeholder / no overwrite.

that way it automatically balances itself.