Monday, November 03, 2008
I took the first steps toward building my render farm today, with the purchase of 10 Dell Optiplex Socket 478 main boards.
I chose those because they support Pentium 4 processors, which I have line on for about $25 bucks each, with heatsink/fan. They also support PC-2700 memory which I can get fairly cheap. While the farm won't be the fastest network system ever built each element of the farm will be faster than my current desktop computer.
It's going to be tough project. Since I can't afford 10 windows licences, I'm going to have to load each system with Linux. I'm a linux n00b. Then I have to get Dr.Queue running to manage the task distribution. My goal is to put together 8 machines with P4 2.4+Ghz, 800MHz FSB, and 512K L2, with 10GB Hard drives, and 2Gigs memory running a low overhead Linux distro. The other boards will have larger Hard drives, and I'm hoping to get one of them running Ubuntu for the eye candy (It will be the working machine and not carry any of the render load.). The Remaing maching will have the low overhead OS and be the controller for the rest of the setup.
With luck I'll be able to get the system running with minimal problems. I'm not trying to become a Linux expert, I just want a low cost render farm.
I chose those because they support Pentium 4 processors, which I have line on for about $25 bucks each, with heatsink/fan. They also support PC-2700 memory which I can get fairly cheap. While the farm won't be the fastest network system ever built each element of the farm will be faster than my current desktop computer.
It's going to be tough project. Since I can't afford 10 windows licences, I'm going to have to load each system with Linux. I'm a linux n00b. Then I have to get Dr.Queue running to manage the task distribution. My goal is to put together 8 machines with P4 2.4+Ghz, 800MHz FSB, and 512K L2, with 10GB Hard drives, and 2Gigs memory running a low overhead Linux distro. The other boards will have larger Hard drives, and I'm hoping to get one of them running Ubuntu for the eye candy (It will be the working machine and not carry any of the render load.). The Remaing maching will have the low overhead OS and be the controller for the rest of the setup.
With luck I'll be able to get the system running with minimal problems. I'm not trying to become a Linux expert, I just want a low cost render farm.
Exciting!! I'm sure you'll be successful...can't wait to see what you're able to do with the farm!
