Sun network.com renders Peach
Posted in Production by Ton
Sun Microsystems has decided to sponsor the Peach project, by granting hours on their network.com Sun Grid Compute Utility for rendering of the Peach Open Movie. With hundreds of Solaris nodes composed of 64 bit CPU’s and 4 gigs of memory per CPU, Sun Grid will give us virtually unlimited power!
This is also good news for the Solaris users out there, who’ll see a bit more attention and testing efforts for their OS. Further we’ll have to review the current state of renderfarm software and ensure that renderjobs can be properly monitored (blender log files). More food for the stats junks!
(Check the network.com website, it shows a cute Chinese researcher using a Blender magnifier! :)
October 26th, 2007 at 5:38 pm
cool! So you can push your render quality waaaaay up!
October 26th, 2007 at 5:44 pm
Why you do not use Solaris for development Peach?
October 26th, 2007 at 6:09 pm
Sweet! I’d be interesting in learning which render farm management solution the team ends up using. I believe for ED DrQueue was used.
October 26th, 2007 at 6:19 pm
Mise: we will use at least one Solaris station here in the studio for tests and compiling. The rest of the systems are Linux.
Jacob: we tried drQueue, but we ended up with our own Python code.
October 26th, 2007 at 6:59 pm
In general Linux has better software/hardware support over Solaris. So it makes sense to use it for development. However neither of those really matter for a renderfarm (all you need is a NIC), so Solaris would work fine there.
This is good news.
October 26th, 2007 at 8:08 pm
I’d also say it’s a matter of personal preference. Each OS has it’s strengths and weaknesses, and it’s a testament to Blender’s cross-platform compatibility that they can just start using it on Solaris as well. Try that with Maya. :P
October 26th, 2007 at 8:15 pm
Great news, I can’t wait to see the first results!
And, please. promise to include that Chinese researcher in the movie – after all your are sponsored now! :P
October 26th, 2007 at 9:47 pm
hy Ton :)
That mean`s that will have a blender render manager included for 2.5 ?!
Will the new renderer be capable of rendering line per line and resume ?! (aka PovRay type of render manage)
I believe that Sun`s offer it is for speeding up the production and quality leaving more time for developing.
That means wee will have some “Christmas” surprise :D
October 27th, 2007 at 12:08 am
Ton, you and your team wrote a Python script for dist. rendering? That’s awesome. Is this script still under development and/or will it be included with 2.50? Does it support bucket rendering? Sorry for all the questions; it’s exciting to hear about open source projects giving commercial vendors a run for their money.
October 27th, 2007 at 12:41 am
Sun rulez
At the risk of sounding like a complete techno freek will any Sunfire T1000/T2000/T5000 servers be used in the render farm.
The reason i ask for those who are not aware is that the sunfire T series machines use a UltraSparc T1/T2 processor capable upto 64 simultaneous threads at 1GHz on a single chip. I do believe that T stands for terminator.
If these servers are available to project peach will Blenders rendering capabilities be beefed up to allow more than 8 threads.
For those of you who want to slaughter me go ahead!
October 27th, 2007 at 6:15 am
Seems like YafRay is on Network.com’s list as well. I wonder if there could be a YafRay rendered version of Peach…
October 27th, 2007 at 10:58 am
Regarding using sun for workstations,
Its a bit of an unknown to me, Iv tinkered with Solaris a little but Im not sure how it would go with blender + gimp + inkscape + multi monitor + wacom tablet + scanner.
Not everything works nice (bloody printers go on the blink) but at least there are a lot of resources available for configuring devices for linux.
OpenSolaris is a great initiative and Im looking forward to getting a system up and running to make sure we can blender for the renderfarm.
October 27th, 2007 at 11:10 am
Jacob:
We used python for Elephants Dream render jobs too. “Bucket rendering” (several systems each doing a tile) was not coded. We might check on it for Peach, although having 8 cpus in a single node (rendering 8 threads) is as good – if not better – as having 8 buckets… so!
October 27th, 2007 at 1:14 pm
You use only ubuntu version linux for development Peach Open Movie?
October 27th, 2007 at 5:59 pm
wow… this recalls me 1990’s when a small studio render it’s first movie, that was a blockbuster. They use Sun. I think story repeats.
http://sunsite.uakom.sk/sunworldonline/swol-11-1995/swol-11-pixar.html
October 27th, 2007 at 10:17 pm
Lucky ones :P
That´s what I call a Good Production job. Working without a render farm is really depressing ^_~
October 28th, 2007 at 12:26 am
Quote Ton: “The rest of the systems are Linux.”
GREAT!
:-D
Also the news of the Sun involvement for the rendering it’s fantastic.
The balls are rolling, very good news, thanks for sharing.
October 28th, 2007 at 12:39 am
Will it be possible for anyone to purchase blender render time on sun?
And if yes, will they have the most recent version of Blender? Currently, their website says version 2.42a – I don’t think peach will be rendered in that version.
October 28th, 2007 at 12:26 pm
@BB.
Look at their web site. 1$/CPU-Hour
October 29th, 2007 at 4:38 pm
@Najam Iqbal : The Sun Gird is Opteron based. While you are right about the specs of the T1 and T2 servers, the issue is, they are built for bandwidth not floating-point math. So they work great for database/web serving (great is a understatement). But for something like rendering they would not do so good.
November 15th, 2007 at 4:58 pm
Hi, please, can you post the specs for the sun workstation you are using, i’m about to order one (not on my budget :-) and want to know what to put inside.
November 27th, 2007 at 3:45 am
This truly boosts my opinion of Sun even higher than it already was! The way that so many online communities are functioning is so extremely progressive, I will love to see what gets accomplished in the next ten years.