Hello, im in the proccess of making my small test diskless beowulf cluster
And i have a small question if anybody has used this medhod
I know in blender u can choose how many threads you are using for rendering.
And in beowulf cluster all the “slave cpu’s” would be considered as my front end’s cpu’s?
so if i setup this cluster, would it be so that i can see all the clusters CPU’s inside blender and just use blender in front end pc?
ps this would be the only option for me because all the slaves are windows machines and i dont wanna partion their hdd’s (and 1 of them dont even have hdd) for linux or anything, so netboot is my only option.
I guess no one knows it simply because no one tried yet
Usually no one sets up a beowulf, you just install some kind of network renderer and distribute seperate frames to the designated slaves.
I guess using a linux based beowulf OS and installing blender on the front end machine it should show all cores, but you can´t be certain unless you try it.
It would be nice if it would work.
If you come around to try it, I am all ears to hear your thoughts and experiences on that project =)
As for your problem… I don´t see where no HDD or windows machines cause a problem?
There are plenty of netrender solutions that work xplatform.
And there are even LiveLinux like Quantian which runs Beowulf clusters from DVD - should also support usb-boot.
First, lemme say I don’t know what I’m talking about, so anyone feel free to correct me…
I’m no expert in networking computers, but I don’t see how you could combine 2 computers to act as 1 bigger multi-core machine. I do have a small renderfarm and I understand network rendering. What I’m thinking is that while you can get several computers to boot from and share one hdd is a bit different than sharing cpu cores or memory or for that matter, say a video card. Most modern BIOS can be set to boot from a network drive and really all that does is tell the computer instead of accessing this cable (the one between the hard drive and the mobo) is access this cable (networking cables). That’s an over-simplifaction of what really happens, but point is there is no way to allow memory or cpu’s to be shared like that.
However, if the operating system handles all this interaction and masks it from you, then perhaps blender would treat it as one large multi-core cpu.
Indeed it would be nice if you could turn 4 - 1 core, 1-gb computers into a quad core 4gb computer. If it was possible I would have an 8 core, 6gb computer and not the 2 core 2 gb computer I’m using now…
to write code that can scale across multiple machines
this isn’t needed with blender, the code to do this is already built in
I’ve played with it a bit and it worked fine in my simple tests
there are also several standalone tools to build renderfarms that may be worth investigating
to play with the internal code check out the wiki page here
I did some trying on Virtualbox, first i installed PelicanHPC, but i didnt like the fact it was liveCD, so couldnt save things.
So ended up Trying KestrelHPC (installed on Ubuntu 10.04 on Virtualbox, got it working in so it showed 2 cpus (used 1 slave with 1 core and front end with 1 core) but didnt have chance of using Blender cus it doesnt support 3d that well, and honestly didnt know how to make it work in there.
BUT i managed to install ubuntu to my laptop alongside of my win7 (i previously had linux MINT 10 but kestrelHPC didnt work in it)
I setup the KestrelHPC and installed blender, however i still havent made any connection to my other machines because i lost my 2nd router rofl, so i gotta wait till i find it (just moved to new flat)
The reason i want to try this way because basicly it sends copy of the OS your using to any PC connected in lan with netboot enabled, and if it works so that it shows the cores (and actually can use them), i would consider it better than other options because it doesnt need me to start programs on the slaves and nothing in theory could crash in there, except linux itself
I apologize, I was thinking differently. I was thinking of cores, not cpu’s, dunno why I was thinking that way… Anyway, it’s an interesting idea, since I have a spare computer with a bad HDD. I’d be interested in knowing if you do manage to get this working!