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Remote rendering on Amazon EC2 cloud; The Elastic Renderfarm


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Instead of investing in your own render farm you could just log into your Amazon ec 2 account and rent say two Nvidia Titans at $2.50 an hour to do your rendering...which is significant if you calculate in the cost of the electricity for that rendering..

https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/

http://www.judpratt....ec2-renderfarm/

This is probably going to be a lot more economical for all of us than buying 5 physical render nodes then paying for all the electricity to run them.

And not just for renders either...with a decent internet connection you could pay them $30 a month for a 2 TB drive to install your software to say about $.02 a core per hour and just do all your computing iwth them and then interact with them using a cheap computer like a Mac Book Air say and save on electricity and not havign your money invested on a super expensive rapidly depreciating rig like I've been planning.

The electricity costs alone make this worth looking into .

I looked into this in 2011 with a company called Black Sky but it was expensive then.

http://www.blackskycomputing.com/

With Amazon EC it's scalable..at moments you could scale up to 1000 cores if you needed it for a specific task; 60 cores would be $1.20 an hour. Those are Xeon cores. How cheap is that?

You'd just select or deselect cores in your browser as you need them. 60 megapixel images ffs..

Full remote desktop in the cloud...

I've got a friend who's going to be testing this soon. Instead of spending a fortune on my next computer I may just buy 16 gigs of EEC ddr2 RAM and one titan and be done with it. If I have any demands that require more than my twin Xeon Harpertowns and 32 gigs of ddr2 eec RAM I'll just log into my Amazon account. that's a hell of a lot less expensive than having a massive electricity bill and a rapidly depreciating $8000 collection of hardware.

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this is an interesting way

but... how do you transfer all rendered pics to your comp ? :huh:

must i pay the same $xHour during transfer time ?

i saw a 2Teras virtual HD at 30u$ by month but, is there other way to do it ?

ty

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this is an interesting way

but... how do you transfer all rendered pics to your comp ? :huh:

must i pay the same $xHour during transfer time ?

i saw a 2Teras virtual HD at 30u$ by month but, is there other way to do it ?

ty

Moving data back and forth between your home computer and the Amazon drives you create (which are free accounts that stay in place) is transacted by your FTP in this case Filezilla which itself is a free ftp program. This costs nothing. What does cost money is the extra instances, the cores that you rent ($.20/hr more or less per core). Apparently you can also rent GPU time for GPU rendering there as in the first Nvidia video I posted

Watch those videos several times through, it's all there. You're not going to learn it in one go. Also read all the messages he answers in teh follow up to the videos. A lot of questions are answered there

what did it cost to keep my configuration with 3dsmax on the amazon server ?

i hope you will understand me icon_smile.gif

Jud on September 6, 2011 at 8:03 pm

said:

The AMI itself doesn’t appear to cost anything to keep. It’s the active instances and volumes that you’ll have to pay for your time on.

The volumes themselves are very cheap to run. The instances are what will start to add up.

When you have completed working with your instances, be sure to Terminate them in the EC2 console by right clicking on them and selecting ‘terminate.’ If you have a bunch, you can shift-click, select them all, and then terminate them all at once.

After the termination is complete, you’ll want to go to the volumes tab and delete any remaining volumes.

The saved 60 gig AMI doesn’t seem to cost anything to store when you’re not running any instances.

Just for reference, here’s a sample of my bill for so far in September. All prices are in US dollars. This was for 20 instances rendering a 3DS Max project. Each instance had the 60 gig volume attached that’s associated with the AMI and there was also one single 40 gig volume attached to the render manager to be used as a network drive.

The total render time was 45 hours of machine time spread over 20 machines which basically means I was able to do 45 hours of rendering in a little over 2 hours of actual time.

Link to the September bill thus far: http://www.judpratt....SeptAWSBill.jpg

Hope this helps!

–Jud

$27 for a month with 45 hours of use...

That's a hell of a lot cheaper than sinking your money into a render farm and electricity bill.

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yeah... this is really amazing, and do a twist in my renderfarm configuration future plans :blink:

i need to read more ^_^

not using luxrender but blender cycles gpu rendering...

and 66 cores for particle simulation ? this knock me out of my socks ! :wacko:

ty for sharing

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yeah... this is really amazing, and do a twist in my renderfarm configuration future plans :blink:

i need to read more ^_^

not using luxrender but blender cycles gpu rendering...

and 66 cores for particle simulation ? this knock me out of my socks ! :wacko:

ty for sharing

I have my own selfish motives for sharing; the bigger the knowledge base the better and easier this will get for all of us.

My friend who alerted me to this is getting another friend to lend him his AMI on Monday for some tests. He's promised to screen share it with me on Skype.

I'm thinking of not only rendering or particle simulations but if you can rent powerful GPUs like the long haired guy in the NVIDIA you tube then why not just use it as a remote desktop entirely. He said he'd install Zbrush and we'll test it to see if it's possible to vpn remote desktop sculpt with this arrangement and if it is, what the latency is.

Imagine if it was set up so that all you'd have to own is some inexpensive $500 super thin laptop and then log into Amazon and use all your programs that you've installed on their servers. Imagine working with say eon Vue on their Xeons with a Titan thrown in. Or doing a big fluid simulation in Real Flow then real time render it at Amazon.

We shall see.

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ooohhh... i see... :o

applying a monthly feed i can access and use a supercomputer, payed by my work... and using my laptop !?!?

i need a cofee break and to put my brain inside the freezer

overclock mind warning alert is bleeping

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ooohhh... i see... :o

applying a monthly feed i can access and use a supercomputer, payed by my work... and using my laptop !?!?

i need a cofee break and to put my brain inside the freezer

overclock mind warning alert is bleeping

Well we don't know yet...we shall see what we shall see.

Why pay into a rapidly depreciating asset to sit on your desk? AND GATHER DUST

The latency may kill this idea. But maybe not. A pair of Teslas at $2.00 an hour may not be set up to run a zbrush interface..It looks like they may be just CUDA cores for RTR. FOR NOW.

Who knows what we'll be taking for granted in two years from now?

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One thing to understand this is not a monthly bill but per use of the instances for rendering.

45 hours of rendering time cost him 27 dollars... The rendering took only 2 hours of course using the amount of cores he choose in his 20 instances.

He also used spot instancing which is the cheapness way to go..

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One thing to understand this is not a monthly bill but per use of the instances for rendering.

45 hours of rendering time cost him 27 dollars... The rendering took only 2 hours of course using the amount of cores he choose in his 20 instances.

He also used spot instancing which is the cheapness way to go..

Exactly. Now it looks like using their GPUs to do GPU real time rendering is more; $2 an hour. but look how fast that is. But my understanding is that GPU rendering isn't as complete as CPU rendering. It's only Ray Tracing, not ambient light etc.

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I was asking my friend about the nature of this multicore setup. And I was wondering if each core only worked on one frame each independently. Apparently not. They work in parallel. so for instance you could ramp up to 1000 top of the line Xeon cores to render one frame, like the Maxwell benchwell test. Parallel buckets whoooeee.

http://www.maxwellre...x.php/benchwell

4.JPGbenchwell_00_main.jpg

That's a 3d coat modeled scene too. Not bad eh?

I wonder how fast 1000 Xeon cores could render that if 64 opteron cores render it in 3.5 minutes? :blink:

And that 1000 Xeon cores would rent out at something like $10 an hour.

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uh oh... :blink:

at my job... a team is rendering some graphic posters at high resolution that take a lifeeee, this is a great option...

one q: Parallel buckets is app dependent ?

works like one machine with 1000 cores... or do you need a virtual render farm connected to 125 IP address ? :huh:

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uh oh... :blink:

at my job... a team is rendering some graphic posters at high resolution that take a lifeeee, this is a great option...

one q: Parallel buckets is app dependent ?

works like one machine with 1000 cores... or do you need a virtual render farm connected to 125 IP address ? :huh:

Like I said You're going to have to watch that 5 part tutorial four or five times closely and maybe even send some emails to the guy that made them. Then read the Amazon site and all the educational material there ..

http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/. I haven't even watched part 5 yet myself. I'm going on what my ee friend is telling me.

then get your own free account and free AMI and upload your software and start doing some experiments. spend $10 or $20 or so

Can I have a job where you work? lol

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