"Antique" Computers Resurrected As Rendering Farm? 17
Dynedain asks: "Let's suppose that an architecture fraternity suddenly has the opportunity of obtaining a handful or two of old SGI Indigos for little or no cost. What do they do with them? Obvious answer: set up a render farm for their digital projects. Now the question is HOW? We have the ability to network these machines (via TCP/IP on a 10bT network) and a few of us have experience w/ UNIX flavors. We've even been playing with Blender, but it seems to lack network rendering support. Considering we are relative newbies, the limitations of the Indigo (1Gb HD, 96 MB RAM, IRIX 5.3), and the fact that we have no money to spend on licensing, what solutions are available for implementing a 3D render farm with DXF support? Do we cluster? Or do we run network scripts?"
Do it for the sheer fun, not the performance (Score:5)
Hi
Those Indigos, while nice, aren't exactly real performers anymore (especially if they've still got R3000 CPUs). A modern day CPU, such as an AMD Athlon, will run circles around a bunch of those SGI boxes. If you want performance, buy an AMD Duron or even a Thunderbird. A Pentium III would do nicely too.
However, if you're into this kind of stuff (clusters, etc), this is going to be a lot of fun!
You could use a free raytracer, such as POVray or BMRT, which should give you excellent quality output. You should still be able to find IRIX 5.3 binaries of both programs.
You'll need to use some other program to convert your CAD files to one of the formats supported by these raytraces. There are several programs that can do this.
Well... (Score:1)
Slightly off-topic, but don't knock aged hardware. At a company (printing) I used to work for, we kept a Quadra840AV and a Quadra950 around, running MacOS 7.5.5, Quark 4.x, and Photoshop 3.x for those just-in-case times. What we found, though, is that the two, old '040 based Macs were perfectly usable as production machines and, oddly, felt zippier than our new PowerMac 7500s at times. Weird, huh? (This was several years ago, btw.)
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Network rendering (Score:1)
You probably will need to come up with some custom scripts to convert DXF files into the proper format. In my experience, DXF files are a very poor way to transport models. If you are doing work in Autocad, then I recommend finding a DWG converting.
Re:Well... (Score:2)
Usability is possible on outdated hardware, except where computational neccesity overrides.
Tried Hash? (Score:1)
Re:OT: Old 486's (Score:1)
Install a standard Linux with IP Masq and sell them as servers/firewalls. Lots of people are running home networks.
Re:Well... (Score:1)
BUT, I do know what you mean about the user interface sucking cycles--*cough* MacOS X. Soon as Flash, Photoshop (sorry--doin' color prepress and the GIMP is just not quite there yet), Illustrator, Quark, and Director run on Linux, I'll switch--once someone writes a friggin' tool to convert my fonts. I'm not parting with a few thousand dollars of typefaces. Makes Linux a very non-free solution for me.
Rambling....
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old indigos (Score:1)
Re:Do it for the sheer fun, not the performance (Score:1)
I do have the 'top-of-the-range' graphics option though, and that is not really anything to write home about, even on the basic gouraud-shaded stuff it ought to do well. There's something about these boxes though - as soon as the O2s are below about $1200 (soon), I'll be looking again
The R3000 Indigos (there were R4000 ones too) ran at 33Mhz, IIRC. I would imagine you're looking at fast 386 style speeds.
Try http://www.specbench.org/cgi-bin/osgresults
to find out more. I couldn't see any SGIs that old in the listings, but other things with the same class of CPU were: Decstation 3000 series (and 5000 I think) and the MIPS Magnum. For compute comparisons they'd probably be useful. Then find the Intel part with similar speeds (it'll probably be two - one for FP and a different one for int).
Since rendering (in a farm situation) is pretty much pure computation, I would have thought it wasn't worth your while - although it *would* look nice, and it'd sound impressive to PHB types - one small thing: make sure your Indigo's come *with* keyboards and mice - you see a lot of people on the newsgroups looking for those things - they're not standard PS/2 ones.
[anyone have an R4400SC/200 module they want to get rid of?
OT: Old 486's (Score:1)
(mostly dx2/66s, no more than 16mb ram given the availible simms and slots; disks in the 400 - 600 mb capacity range)
One is well on its way to being a modem router/firewall. Anouther is being used a a print server, and running a disk used for network back-up.
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Re:OT: Old 486's (Score:2)
Of course the power bills might be a bit high.....
Re:Do it for the sheer fun, not the performance (Score:1)
Blender has network support! (soon) (Score:2)
Go to the Anim menu, look for a button that says Render Daemon. There's your network support. It's even going to be open source when released. If you can hold out for that, you should. Blender is one of the best ways to go, IMHO.
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you may quote me
Re:Do it for the sheer fun, not the performance (Score:1)
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Re:Do it for the sheer fun, not the performance (Score:1)
and the fact that we have no money to spend on licensing
... or anything else for that matter. I am amazed at how many people forget to read the postings! Forget other hardware, we didn't ask about other hardware (I say "we" because I am a member of this fraternity). What do you suggest we do with what we've got?
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Re:Tried Hash? (Score:1)
Power use (Score:2)
Back when distirbtued.net first started (rc5-56, and a ppro-200 was a mean machine) I calculated that enough 386s to equal one ppro-200 would use enough more electrisity that in a year you would have been better off buying the ppro.
Of course if you want the geek factor, or don't pay utilities, then enjoy. Otherwise think twice about a ne machine.