render farms, pipelines, filesystems

[eloop]

(crossposted from the SideFX mailing list to pull in a larger audience ...)

Hi all,

I'm interested in hearing about experiences people have had

implementing render farms where you *don't* have a shared file system

between workstations and render farms. I currently have a solution

than involves shipping resources back and forth. However, it requires

parsing IFD files and heuristically determining what resources are

needed for a render and what results needed to be transported back

post render. I'd like to make this more robust and I'm sure that this

is something that large facilities have to solve sooner or later. And

the same problems must crop up whatever software is used (prman,

MentalRay etc). Following is a bunch of questions that come to mind,

some houdini specific, others more general.

Do you generate IFD's out on the farm or on artists workstations, and

if so how are resources synced across to where they are needed ?

Is it the case that you purchase expensive global file systems and

maintain a single shared file space ? If so, are they robust and

performant ?

Obviously there are significant performance issues to consider. Eg you

are working with Gb's of texture per frame which you don't want to

ship across to a render node every time a frame is rendered. There are

many possible solutions to this problem but I'd love to hear about

experiences in the trenches ...

At what point do you find that single NFS servers grind to halt ? Is

scalability and locality a solved problem or something you're always

having to tweak ?

Are you restricted to certain workstation architectures ?

Does your solution restrict you to a certain applications ?

Any feedback appreciated,

Drew