I think where I'm at is trying to figure out what the main limiting factor is here versus building something from the ground up, piece by piece (probably PC based for cost).

Do you have a sense of specifically what the networking issues were?  For cinema rendering, my understanding is that once the net render files have been distributed amongst the nodes, their really isn't a ton of network traffic, except for the rendered frames being copied back over to the server.  However, I may be wrong on this… I don't know a ton of what goes on under the hood of these farms…

Have been exchanging emails with the owner of this company:

http://h-sq.com/products/minirack/index.html

to see if he's heard any anecdotal info from any of his clients.  He hand't heard anything specific other than describing one server set-up he'd heard of that utilized 160 mac minis for some type of test automation (not sure what that is), but they were all being taxed 100% of the time and seemed to run fine…

--

tony romain | principal/creative director

trance

motion graphic animation and design

323 651 1114

www.trancedesigns.com

From: Teddy Gage <teddygage@gmail.com>
Reply-To: AE list <AE-List@media-motion.tv>
Date: Monday, November 12, 2012 12:05 PM
To: AE list <AE-List@media-motion.tv>
Subject: Re: [AE] Semi OT: Yet another mac mini render farm thread

My main concern would be the networking back end. Unless you have an applescript wizard on hand you may run into some problems, even with a networked rendering package like deadline. We tried to do something like this at a place I was working a few years ago and it was rage-inducing. The frustrating thing was "it should have worked" but it just didn't. There were always problems. maybe if you installed win 7 pro in bootcamp on all of them. but I guess that would defeat the purpose. Things have probably come along since then however