Dear Linuxers I work for a small animation/graphics studio.We use MAYA,Houdini and some other applications on windows. Now we are in a process of shifting the whole studio systems to linux.We have used debian as well as suse but we had issues with the installation of some application like XSI. So we are now using RedHat EL AS. Currently all is fine but we would like to use some kind of clustering software to use network rendering. This can speed up the rendering process.
Anybody pointers on which software to use for this.
Sejal Patel Linuxer!! Linux Registerd User : #406578
Dear Linuxers I work for a small animation/graphics studio.We use MAYA,Houdini and some other applications on windows. Now we are in a process of shifting the whole studio systems to linux.We have used debian as well as suse but we had issues with the installation of some application like XSI. So we are now using RedHat EL AS. Currently all is fine but we would like to use some kind of clustering software to use network rendering. This can speed up the rendering process.
SUNGrid Engine works great for rendering applications. It basically is a job distribution engine. You have to configure it for your requirement.
Linux + SUNGrid is rock stable combination.
Anybody pointers on which software to use for this.
http://gridengine.sunsource.net/
Happy Rendering
Balwinder
Sejal Patel wrote:
I work for a small animation/graphics studio.We use MAYA,Houdini and some other applications on windows. Now we are in a process of shifting the whole studio systems to linux.
Could you list the linux equivalent softwares for Maya, 3DS Max8, Sony Vegas Video 6?
Do you get linux drivers for very high end graphics hardware? What hardware do you use for graphics in linux?
Regards,
Rony.
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On Saturday 07 January 2006 15:38, Rony Bill wrote:
Sejal Patel wrote:
I work for a small animation/graphics studio.We use MAYA,Houdini and some other applications on windows. Now we are in a process of shifting the whole studio systems to linux.
Could you list the linux equivalent softwares for Maya, 3DS Max8, Sony Vegas Video 6?
Blenderer, Gelato, Aqsis, Slander, Buffy, 3Delight, Lives, Broadcast 2000 http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/3D-Modelling-5.html#ss5.2
This is a mix of renderers and editors.
Do you get linux drivers for very high end graphics hardware? What hardware do you use for graphics in linux?
Instead of spending Rs.60K on a single card with snakeoil support u are better off building a cluster of 10K mobos and using this as a renderer. U also have an advantage of more than one person using the cluster.
On Saturday 07 January 2006 11:09, JTD wrote:
Instead of spending Rs.60K on a single card with snakeoil support u are better off building a cluster of 10K mobos and using this as a renderer. U also have an advantage of more than one person using the cluster.
not to mention the lower maintenance and redundancy :)
JTD wrote:
Instead of spending Rs.60K on a single card with snakeoil support u are better off building a cluster of 10K mobos and using this as a renderer. U also have an advantage of more than one person using the cluster.
Video editing is a new territory for me so right now I am only supplying the configuration chosen by the customer.
I will go through the links. Till now I thought clustering was only used by super-computers. I will investigate more.
Regards,
Rony.
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On Sunday 08 January 2006 13:29, Rony Bill wrote:
I will go through the links. Till now I thought clustering was only used by super-computers. I will investigate more.
Very correct. That is what u are getting - for free. Well almost compared to the cost of a supercomputer. For an equivalent performance machine your customer would be spending $$$$ and u earning peanuts. use GNU and u earn the cream.
JTD wrote:
Very correct. That is what u are getting - for free. Well almost compared to the cost of a supercomputer. For an equivalent performance machine your customer would be spending $$$$ and u earning peanuts. use GNU and u earn the cream.
If you or anyone else has a cluster running somewhere for graphics, could I get a short writeup on the hardware used, how it is joined together (pc to pc) and just a wee bit on its software and setup. It is just for virtual practicals. :)
Thanks and Regards,
Rony.
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On 1/9/06, Rony Bill ronbillypop@yahoo.co.uk wrote:
JTD wrote:
If you or anyone else has a cluster running somewhere for graphics, could I get a short writeup on the hardware used, how it is joined together (pc to pc) and just a wee bit on its software and setup. It is just for virtual practicals. :)
Rony there are only 2 large installations that I have seen. A render farm typically consist about a few tens to few hundreds of dual processor HT / xeon (em64t) class systems with some expensive display cards and atleast a few gigs of high speed ram . needless to say about raid sata / scsi disk .
say if there are 11 boxes the first box serves as the grid master with 10 boxes running the grid engine client. the master distributes the task to the clients . the task can be copied over a nfs share on a network . this is for a company that some real anim work for movies etc.
u can certainly setup a lowerend system for small testing etc ... sun grid engine project might be a nice place to start.
maybe sejal can do a write up once they are up
regards harsh
Thanks and Regards,
Rony.
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On Monday 09 January 2006 20:45, Rony Bill wrote:
JTD wrote:
Very correct. That is what u are getting - for free. Well almost compared to the cost of a supercomputer. For an equivalent performance machine your customer would be spending $$$$ and u earning peanuts. use GNU and u earn the cream.
If you or anyone else has a cluster running somewhere for graphics, could I get a short writeup on the hardware used, how it is joined together (pc to pc) and just a wee bit on its software and setup. It is just for virtual practicals. :)
Unfortunately i dont have a cluster running. But i (and i am sure several others on the list) would be more than wiling to help if u could get the mobos, ram and gigabit backbone.
JTD wrote:
Unfortunately i dont have a cluster running. But i (and i am sure several others on the list) would be more than wiling to help if u could get the mobos, ram and gigabit backbone.
At present, I don't have any spare hardware. I thought some of the list members are actually using clusters for their graphics work so if they could post a brief overall view of their system, that would help too. Right now I need to get some idea first of the whole setup. If it is a confidential company matter for those members, then no problem.
As per your estimate, what would be the cluster hardware equivalent for the following system below.
AMD Athlon X2 4200 (Dual Core). Asus A8N SLI Premiun. ( Has 2 x 1 GBit LANs) 2 x 1 GB DDR RAM. 2 x 160 GB SATA HDD with 8 MB cache. Leadtek Nvidia Quadro FX 3450 with 256 mb DDR RAM. Decklink extreme video edit card. Can handle multiple video and audio inputs and outputs with 10bit resolution. 2 Monitors for split screen. Cabinet with 500w SMPS.
Could the future ilug-bom meets have a demo session on clustering? We could rent a lab or look for one in a college? Just a simple how-to using 3 to 4 pcs.
Regards,
Rony.
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On Tuesday 10 January 2006 17:28, Rony Bill wrote:
At present, I don't have any spare hardware. I thought some of the list members are actually using clusters for their graphics work so if they could post a brief overall view of their system, that would help too. Right now I need to get some idea first of the whole setup. If it is a confidential company matter for those members, then no problem.
As per your estimate, what would be the cluster hardware equivalent for the following system below.
AMD Athlon X2 4200 (Dual Core). Asus A8N SLI Premiun. ( Has 2 x 1 GBit LANs) 2 x 1 GB DDR RAM. 2 x 160 GB SATA HDD with 8 MB cache. Leadtek Nvidia Quadro FX 3450 with 256 mb DDR RAM. Decklink extreme video edit card. Can handle multiple video and audio inputs and outputs with 10bit resolution. 2 Monitors for split screen. Cabinet with 500w SMPS.
U need three specs rather the pointless things abv for evaluation. cpu-mem bandwidth, Cpu to Northbridge link speed for disk bandwidth (mostly not useful in clusters) and Cpu to South bridge link speed for the PCI bandwidth. One presumes the memory modules and pci cards are fast enough to cope. The graphics port on the north bridge will remain unused. Mobo without on board graphics would be much better as it will run cooler. Disabling graphics might not reduce power.
JTD wrote:
U need three specs rather the pointless things abv for evaluation. cpu-mem bandwidth, Cpu to Northbridge link speed for disk bandwidth (mostly not useful in clusters) and Cpu to South bridge link speed for the PCI bandwidth. One presumes the memory modules and pci cards are fast enough to cope. The graphics port on the north bridge will remain unused. Mobo without on board graphics would be much better as it will run cooler. Disabling graphics might not reduce power.
The application is as follows. Taking a video clip from a camera as well as a VTR, processing it in the machine and editing it. After edit, its converted to dvd for backup and broadcast. One second of uncompressed video is 50 MB in digital format. From all this data, how does one calculate the above 3 parameters.
Regards,
Rony.
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On Tuesday 10 January 2006 21:05, Rony Bill wrote:
The application is as follows. Taking a video clip from a camera as well as a VTR,
This is the capture part and is very io intensive. This will happen on a standalone machine. 25 fps D1 10 bits per color. 25*720*576*3*2=62.2MBps. Regular pci bus will choke. U require hardware compression on the capture card or PCIE. And fast storage 230 GB per hr of raw video.
processing it in the machine
This can be distributed on the cluster and will scale linearly.
and editing it.
Same here. Both the above depends on what processing u are doing. Basically each frame is divided into blocks. Figures are available on the net for compute cycles per block and per frame. U can distribute blocks or frames across the cluster. There are tradeoffs.
After edit, its converted to dvd for backup and broadcast. One second of uncompressed video is 50 MB in digital format.
See above.
From all this data, how does one calculate the above 3 parameters.
Regards,
Rony.
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On Tuesday 10 January 2006 10:58, JTD wrote:
Unfortunately i dont have a cluster running. But i (and i am sure several others on the list) would be more than wiling to help if u could get the mobos, ram and gigabit backbone.
Is a gigabit backbone really necessary?
Sometime on Tue, Jan 10, 2006 at 04:58:20PM +0000, Dinesh Joshi said:
Is a gigabit backbone really necessary?
It is. With a cluster of machines, network itself can become biggest bottle neck. Clusters normally use Infiniband ethernet, not even gigabit.
Anurag
On Tuesday 10 January 2006 17:15, Anurag wrote:
Sometime on Tue, Jan 10, 2006 at 04:58:20PM +0000, Dinesh Joshi
said:
Is a gigabit backbone really necessary?
It is. With a cluster of machines, network itself can become biggest bottle neck. Clusters normally use Infiniband ethernet, not even gigabit.
Network IS the bottleneck. Particularly in graphics applications. So let's say u have no cpu-mem bottleneck, a node will pump out 200Mbps of data. Next bottleneck is PCI then cpu-mem and finally cpu mips. So with a P4 mobo and 1Gbps network u can have 10 nodes max.
On 1/7/06, Rony Bill ronbillypop@yahoo.co.uk wrote:
Sejal Patel wrote:
I work for a small animation/graphics studio.We use MAYA,Houdini and
some
other applications on windows. Now we are in a process of shifting the
whole
studio systems to linux.
Could you list the linux equivalent softwares for Maya, 3DS Max8, Sony Vegas Video 6?
We use Maya 7.0, Houdini 8 & XSI (Softimage)
Do you get linux drivers for very high end graphics hardware? What
hardware do you use for graphics in linux?
Regards,
Rony.
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-- Regards, Rohit Baisakhiya KiranInfotech
On 1/7/06, Sejal Patel sejallinuxpatel@gmail.com wrote:
Dear Linuxers I work for a small animation/graphics studio.We use MAYA,Houdini and some other applications on windows. Now we are in a process of shifting the whole studio systems to linux.We have used debian as well as suse but we had issues with the installation of some application like XSI. So we are now using RedHat EL AS. Currently all is fine but we would like to use some kind of clustering software to use network rendering. This can speed up the rendering process.
Hi Sejal ,
Suggest u use a fast file system like XFS , JFS , Reiserfs. A system with support for multipath and async i/o for better performance.
I have seen a few places using SunGrid engine running a similar infrastructure for render farms.
Regards Harsh
Anybody pointers on which software to use for this.
Sejal Patel Linuxer!! Linux Registerd User : #406578 -- http://mm.ilug-bom.org.in/mailman/listinfo/linuxers
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Anurag -
Dinesh Joshi -
JTD -
linux＠trustedmachines.com -
Rohit Baisakhiya -
Rony Bill -
SeekingGyan -
Sejal Patel