LINUX based render farm

[michael j. cabanski]

dear sir/madam;

came across the Panorama site, and thought our two projects might benefit from a possible colaboration.

i'm an xpat yankee (with 20 years of extensive 1's and 0's experience in multi-media) currently living and working in London, we are developing a LINUX based render farm system, a highly scale_able, cost-effective/efficient parallel processing system exploiting LINUX/Intel technologies (R.H.7.0/Pent.III733), primarily for the rendering of high res. 3D animation, non-linear editing outPut, special effects and post-production enhancement.  final frame images being printed to 35mm film and/or DVD.

we are in need of a bit of consulting on the software front.  what we would ideally like to do, is to lic. LINUX OS  versions (if they exist) of rendering modules for products such as ElectricImage/LightWave, etc. as they are quite the industry standards.  if such a system were to come onLine, making hi-res/costEffective rendering of motion sequence outPut, with quick/reliable turnaround, it would do no harm to the popularity of such products with big/tight budget projects (i.e. Titanic, Star Wars, Men in Black).

here's the project/system in a nutshell:
(also see attached)

objective/description

design and implementation of LINUX based render farm system, utilizing a data "appliance" approach, modular design, keeping all boxen as simple and as task specific as possible (i.e. each box/mod is optimised for its specific application).

the design makes max use of tried, true and tested/affordable technologies (not quite cutting-edge, but shitHot, and cost-effective, i.e. PIII/733, ATA166 drives, 100BaseT ethernet, etc).

scalability is an important factor in the design, a system can have anywhere, from 2 to 50
Fattening Pen mod. (fp), per Silo mod. coupled with as many 35mm film burners as required.

the mods. all sit on a simple yet tight TCP/IP network, switched LAN(100/1000BaseT ethernet)

hosts and perifs are all id_ed and called with IP addresses only, thus eliminating any NIS or DNS overHead, making things simple, fast and efficient. other than init. config, all monitoring and job control is done via comandLine telnet sessions to the various mods. minimizing network traffic, and the need for extensive KVM switches, multi keyboards and monitors (no clutter!!!!).

a 25-fp mod system, would fit in a 1.5m X 1m X 2m enclosure,

everything sits nicely in19" racks, in an air/co controlled environment,

as you might imagine, all those CPUs rendering away, kick out a fair number of BTUs.

OK! on to the nitty gritty!!

Basic schematic
a. Fattening Pen mod. (fp)
   LINUX OS (optimised kernel) rendering engine/NFS client
PIII/733 Intel M/B (133mhzFSB), 512mb-1.5gb RAM, 20gb ATA166 drive,
     100BaseT nic,1u rackmount case, w/180w p/s

b. Network mod.

        Cisco 3524 series 100BaseT LAN switches

        w/gigaBit ethernet backbone (cat5e utp)

        linking12 port(100BaseT) switch and  the "Silo" mod.

c. Silo mod.

        LINUX OS (optimised kernel) file serving and admin mod.

        NFS server and job control/admin. db
    PIII/733 Intel M/B 512mb-1.5gb RAM, 20gb ATA166 drive(system drive)

        300gb SCSI RAID1(striped)*, gigaBit Ethernet nic.

        4u rackmount case, w/400w p/s

       

        *file serving of common/shared resources (SRD, shared resource

        directory, "the sardine can"), this is where  models, shaders,
  texture maps, backdrop stills and motion seq. live, available to the
    fp mods via NFS.  its also a holding buffer for completed frames,
       waiting to be downloaded/burned on to 35mm film,
        broadcast quality digital tape and/or DVD.


Applications
a. rendering of 3D stills and animation seq. (LightWave and ElectricImage, etc.)
b. rendering of non-linear editing (i.e. Final Cut, Premiere, AfterEffects).
c. maintaining  db of shader and texture map libs. (off-site b/u)
d. maintaining  db of customer models and
shared resources (off-site b/u)

we have some 6 figures worth of R&D/seed money for the project, between pinewood studios and hollywood, they are all very keen on the development of fast and cheap rendering, with such reliance on digital effects in current productions (growing all the time), hi-res rendering can be an expensive/timeConsuming production bottleNeck. as we have the hardware side of things fairly sussed out, and LINUX is free, most of those R&D bucks will go on application software acquisition, and tweaking.  look forward to hear from you in the near future, all the best, over and out!!

Ciao,

R=F.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document

-- 
michael j. cabanski
infoBahn internationale ltd.
London - UK
020 7703 2072 tel.
07939 261 698 mob.
020 7277 1288 fax