Great news. I just got a grant for the equivalent of about 30,000 dollars over the course of the next two years to buy a Linux cluster, ahem… <cough>renderfarm<cough>… um, for use in my academic research.
So… now, hypothetically speaking, although this Linux cluster is of course primarily intended to be used for academic research which has nothing to do with Blender… let’s say, for example, that a guy in my position was thinking, perhaps, of, maybe, setting up a little bit of a kinda, renderfarm kind of thing on the side…
Any tips on hardware? Software? Rocks vs Beowulf? Linux distros? Things to avoid? Anybody out there using clusters to render?
It is a live CD with all excesive fat trimmed. It has a lot of (broadcast) multimedia apps AND Blender. It can detect other dynebolic boxes on the network to form a cluster automaticaly.
There’s a program called Reppu, that has the following description:
A network render program for blender
Reppu is a Client/Server based program to render blender scenes via network.
So you can render one scene on multiple computers, to decrease render time.
I’d also look for something Debian based. Just…Do it.