> for a mac based render manager check http://www.braverabbit.de/playground/?page_id=716

I've used Pipeline earlier this year for Maya renders at a Mac shop.  Works nicely.  Takes away most of my concerns about the actual render management part of things.

>  However, there's probably a reason you don't hear about this setup more often. It's certainly a lot more expensive per core than an equivalent PC setup would be.

True.  If I went this way, I'd mainly be thinking about something simple and on the smaller end that I could set up here in my studio and expand if needed.  Frequently I could use a few more machines cranking on a 3D render.  For heavy rendering jobs, I usually just use Render Rocket (cloud rendering) and work that into the budget.  But there are enough times that it would be helpful to have some extra juice that I'd consider spending $2 - $3,000 for some more machines here.  The plusses versus a PC setup being that everything else I have is already OSX, they're small, they're quiet, low power consumption, they'd network together easily.

Enticingly, the Geekbench score recorded for the late 2012 i7 Mini (11,656) is almost as good as the 2010 2.4 GHz 8-core Mac Pro I'm using (14,158 as my workstation).  By that metric, adding three Mac Minis to my setup would be like having more than two additional Mac Pros to render with for about $2500.

One of my main concerns would be about reliability if they're pegged at 100% CPU usage for extended periods of time without some additional cooling/ventilation...

- Nathan

On Mon, Nov 12, 2012 at 2:41 PM, Teddy Gage <teddygage@gmail.com> wrote:

I really don't remember. This was about five years ago and we were trying to network together ten Mac pros plus SCSI ram modules and a hugely expensive and unstable RAID. Probably not the best example and I bet its a ton easier these days. However, there's probably a reason you don't hear about this setup more often. It's certainly a lot more expensive per core than an equivalent PC setup would be.

On Nov 12, 2012 3:20 PM, "Tony Romain" <tonyr-aelist@trancedesigns.com> wrote:

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