I am putting together a render farm to learn about parallelization, clustering, rendering, etc. reasons and stuff.
I have about 110 computers all with legal windows xp licenses, but half of them are single core machines.
I will eventually move to Linux, probably Lubuntu, as soon as i become more familiar with it.
I cannot find the hardware requirements for past versions on the blender website, and whatever google turns up is largely unconfirmed.
i have another 100 or so computers that run less than 1ghz, but I don’t want to get into those right now, as they have operating systems ranging from windows 95 to windows 2000.
I would rather not mix os versions and types right out of the gate.
I found plenty of posts on different forums with these specs:
CPU: 300 MHz
RAM: 128 MB
Display: 1024 x 768 16-color
Open GL graphics card with 16 MB RAM
or
1 GHZ Single Core CPU
512 MB RAM
1024 x 768 px Display with 16 bit color
3 Button Mouse
OpenGL Graphics Card with 64 MB RAM
But there are usually no confirmed version numbers associated with them.
If anyone knows where I can find a list of version numbers with their corresponding hardware requirements, I would be most grateful.
I haven’t put it together yet and I’ve never run Blender before. I’m just trying to plan ahead a bit.
Since the computers will all be running as slaves, I’m not concerned too much with Blender running fast as much as running without crashing.
I will be testing different versions once I start the work on this beast, but I was just looking for someone to point me i the right direction if they knew.
Most Blender crashes are from running out of RAM…
If those machines’ amounts of RAM are as sparse as their CPUs are outdated, you will probably not have very much fun with them at all.
Well do so. You may stop yourself wasting your time. Having a single core may not stop blender running, just that with such crap hardware it will run like crap.
Honestly, your probably going to spend as much on power (if that costs comes to you) and time/effort compared to mucking around with a few Amazon EC2 spot instances…
The M3.Medium instance has 1 ~2.5GHz CPU core, with 3.75GB RAM… these go for spot prices of $0.01 USD/hour… you can try cluster 20 for 20c/hour.
On demand costs 6c/hour.
Far easier to experiment with and setup, plus you get a free small instance for 1 year when you sign up (which you can run 4 for 1/4 a month each month)
To be serious, some of those machines are so old (assuming from the specs.) that even the ultra-cheap computing boards of today would run circles around them (ie. the Raspberry Pi).
It is simply not possible for a 3D application to give support for 90’s era hardware while also having the modern technology and high performance that artists need (not the least being the inability to make efficient use of any API from the last ten years).
The system requirements listed on the webpage don’t reflect whether Blender will run or not, they are recommendations. Blender never dropped support for single-core CPUs, nor is there a fixed minimum RAM requirement. How much RAM you need depends mostly on your scene, though there is a base overhead for running Blender (135MB on my system, but it’ll be a bit lower on 32-bit). Running out of RAM doesn’t necessarily imply a crash as long as your operating system can still provide virtual memory, but at that point performance will absolutely tank.
The only hard hardware requirement I can think of is SSE2 support, which your single-core machines may not have. All dual-core processors support it, as far as I know. SSE2 is also a requirement for most Linux distributions, these days.
If you want to run the GUI, you need OpenGL 2.1 support (1.4 in earlier versions), but even that can happen in software. Also, Windows XP support was dropped a few versions back, but since you want to run Linux, that shouldn’t be an issue.
they are going to be stupid nodes that will render small tiles of the main animation. whatever they can do, they will do, how ever little it may be. most of the motherboards will have at least 2gb of ram so i don’t think that will be an issue, but thatks for bringing it to my attention.
the experiment is going to be about clustering and networking, not blender and animation. I only chose blender because it had cluster / networking capabilities. i will build the cluster anyway, and if blender wont run on it, i will find other software. thanks for the infor though.
thanks. i had a feeling that single cores were still able to be used. fortunately for me, the oldest single cores i will be using are pentium 4’s which all support SSE2. the nodes will all be headless, so the Gui will only be needed for the main distribution PC (client?) which will be running windows 7 and a corei5 processor.
