Diskless render nodes in a cluster

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
1

Hello!

Is it possible to build a diskless node render farm? So far, I have found Kerrighed to be a viable solution for PXE booting.

Has anyone tried building a diskless node render farm? If so, how did you do it?

Thanks!

2

Though I havn’t used it yet, Condor has been used before to run a blender renderfarm (not to mention various commercial render farms)

diskless tutorial: http://www.linux.com/archive/articles/49654

some email I recently sent to the condor list asking about using it for durian
https://lists.cs.wisc.edu/archive/condor-users/2009-August/msg00055.shtml

Post from a while ago from someone who setup condor with blender http://blenderartists.org/forum/archive/index.php/t-102226.html

3

There is also a commercial project called Linux RenderFarmer http://www.linuxrenderfarm.com/ which sets up this type of system for you. It costs $250 for an 8 node setup, but it sounds like it takes care of a lot of installation issues and the nodes boot by PXE. I’d like to know Campbell’s take on this system even though it is not strictly open source. Cheers.

4

thanks for the tips! I’ll be reporting back once I get my hands dirty with the cluster :slight_smile:

EDIT:
@ideasman42
I’ve read some clustering HOWTO’s and it explains how to setup the SSI, like this one https://wiki.edubuntu.org/EasyUbuntuClustering/UbuntuKerrighedClusterGuide.

I actually can’t get my hands on the hardware yet, so all I can do right now is to get a feel for the process. I’ve done quite substantial research but I can’t seem to put them all together… hehe… I will, eventually :slight_smile:
I had just finished reading up this link http://www.linux.com/archive/articles/49654, and I think I’m missing a point. It doesn’t explain how to setup the SSI (single system image) which the nodes will boot into. Should I expect this article to explain the process or does drblpush actually setup the diskless nodes in one go? :confused::spin: