My room/office as it stands today is a complete mess, if you were to see it you would think that a tornado hit the newegg warehouse and the twister dropped all the contents smack dab here at my desk, not that it would be a bad thing if that did happen…Walking around my room is like navigating through vines in the rainforest, there are cables everywhere and I am not quite sure if one of them is going to jump up and bite me. Thismorning when I got out of bed I stood on a keyboard and thought I just squashed a thousand bugs. Incase your wondering at this point, no I dont have an actual insect/snake infestation…these metaphore type things just seem apropriate to me at the moment…Anyway, needless to say, this room need to change, for a few reasons, first off, because the room is deffinately not a chick magnet, secondly its getting harder to find things in here, I need a better way of oganization, and thirdly (Yes its now a word, I said so), I need to make some room for a new renderfarm. Forthly (yes thats a word aswel), I am a neat freak at heart and this mess is drying me crazy.
Now, there was one key word (technically two words, so…one key phrase) in that last paragraph which prompted me to blog thismorning/evening, yikes its 5AM! That phrase was RENDER FARM! Yes, this summer I am going to build a renderfarm (on rackmount, boohya!) to aid me in rendering out my long animated sequences which I can’t tell you about because I am under NDA, ooops, said to much already…
In case you don’t know, a render farm is a group of computers which people use to render out frames. As part of my annual hardware upgrades, I fuigured a sustainable, moble renderfarm would be a good project to get up and running this summer. I am planning on doing more to my workstation and what not this year too, but thats boring.
I am not going to be able to afford a complete farm like I would like it for the time being while I am still in school, so I am going to be contributing to it as I can, adding blades/nodes as I go. This is a budget build…and will probobly last me a few months.
I chose to go rackmount because I am in school and will be moving around a lot, so it will be fairly easy to move it around, I also decided to go this way because of heat, cable management, and Network reasons…I think it just makes since right now, am I crazy?
I will be using whatever cheap rack I can get my hands on, and will try to run a gigabyte network…I priced out my blades at around 700 bucks minus an OS, I have yet to decided if I should go XP64 or server, I cant go linux because I mostly use max, anyway the $700 will get me the entire machine which will spec me out at a quad core at 3ghz with 4 gigs of ram (with the option to go 8)….not a bad deal, plug and play rendering power, yes! In my next post I will get into the specifics…its now 5:15AM and I have been up for like 24 hours again, gonna go to sleep, I cant see strait anymore, this should be intresting to read tomorrow, lol later.