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  • Author Author: Workshopshed
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Building a Render Farm with a Bitscope Blade Quatro - Hardware

Workshopshed

As mentioned it the previous post, I'm building a small render farm for Blender using the Bitscope Blade. I decided to mount all the components on a sheet of wood so that I could pack the whole thing away when I was not using it.

 

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Power

Back in March I put together a kit that turned an ATX power supply into a Benchtop Powersupply  I had another of the same 1U ATX supplies that would work well for this project. I chopped up some extension cables so that I could simply plug the supply into the blade and router. I wired up the "PS-ON" to GND as there's a separate on/off switch that can be used on the back of the supply. I also wired up 2x12v connectors for my router and the cluster. I was slightly thrown as the router was 5.5/2.1mm and the Bitscope Blade was 5.5/2.5mm. The disk was an old IDE one so needed a chunky 4 pin connector, the PSU already supplied that. The spare connectors I just bundled in parallel so they would not get in the way. A couple of 3D printed clamps hold the PSU to the backing board.

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External Disk

I had started with a cased disk caddy but realised I also had a simpler one which would allow a bare drive to be used. This should result in the smaller setup. The disk was mounted via some suitably printed brackets.

Network

Each of the pi plugged into a handmade short Ethernet cable and connected to a router. As mentioned in the previous post, one of the challenges of a cluster is managing the software on each node. I'll likely wire the cluster up to my main network for the setup then disconnect it once the software is installed.

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The setup is ready for use now so next up is some configuration.

 

I've put the 3D models into GitHub and will add any scripts and code as they get created.

 

https://github.com/Workshopshed/RenderFarm

 

Reference

Makezine - Turn a computer power supply into a bench power supply

  • Nice update.

     

    I like your approach to the power.  I am working  with the Blade UNO and I am not happy with the wall wart power available, so I will use an old ATX power source as well.

     

    I look forward to comparing notes on these Blade devices.

     

    DAB

  • in reply to Workshopshed

    The approach of the distributed rendereing is something like the following: a master keep in charge the rendering object and start checking (very fast) the approx speed of every rendering node to render objects (e.g. polygons instead of other stuff). Then start deploying to every node he find in the network set for distributed rendering the parts of the object that are rendered in a virtual non relative space; then every pre-rendered element returns the component assembly. This is for high quality slow rendering of static objects.

     

    For a animation instead, that is the most common use, Blender organise the frames distribution then send every frame specifications (point of view, poly etc.) to a node. As the frame from that node is ready, the resulting image is inserted in the animation sequence in the right place. The same works for video rendering like using Adobe Premiere. As far as I know the lowest level of distributed rendering fragmentation is the single frame. More sophisticated rendering servers works on polygons groups, taking in account also of the single node cost (time, money etc.).

     

    I have no idea if you are used to develop complex applications (like kernel modules or entire Android systems) but the render farm is also very useful - and extremely easy to setup- for large number of sources compilation.

     

    Enrico

  • in reply to balearicdynamics

    The whole setup is less than optimal as it's cobbled together from old parts. The ATA disk was a good spec when I bought it over 15 years ago, it can handle I/O data-transfer rate (100 Mbytes/sec max)

     

    http://www.seagate.com/support/disc/manuals/ata/aspenpmb001.pdf

     

    I'm not quite sure how Blender does distributed rendering at the moment, something to come later this month. The SDCard is not likely perform very well so will avoid that if possible.

  • Hello Andy, great project opening the new year eve!

     

    Do you think that there be some improvement with a SSD disK ? (frankly I suppose no due the limitations of the USB 2.0 on the Pi)

    Instead, what about to place a network disk instead of a USB one connected to the Pi ?

     

    I have built in past a bunch of small computers to make a render farm (6 small PC) and it worked well for video network rendering. As far as I know every node was using its own local storage for frame caching and only after the frames assigned to the node was complete the stuff was sent to the master for final merging. Do you plan to use the SD card on the Pi for this operation?

     

    Enrico