Amiga Render Farm

[trekiej]

This question has probably been asked alot.
Is there a website dedicated to an Amiga Render Farm or has anyone here built one.
I have read on a site that you would have to have Queing software.
Networking for amiga is , I hear, expensive due to lack of hardware, except for using Elbox expansion boards.
Any info would be appreciated.
Thanks.

[HellCoder]

Well, you don't really need complex software. Just let one machine render all even frames and another all odd frames.

[Piru]

Um, how about using a single PC to replace the farm of amigas?

[motorollin]

Piru wrote:
Um, how about using a single PC to replace the farm of amigas?

Um, how about answering a perfectly good Amiga-related question instead of discouraging him? Maybe a PC would do it better, but if we all stopped using our Amigas for the things which other platforms do better then this site wouldn't be here.

--
moto

[amigadave]

I am finally getting very close to having the time and all the needed equipment (which I have been collecting for many years) to build my Amiga render farm.  NewTek included software with LightWave to accomplish the queing of assigning which machines will render which frames, but all rendered frames are sent to a central directory to create the desired animation.

Ethernet cards for Amigas are expensive, as you can see when you try to find them online at auctions or online stores.

I can't give you much more info until I set up my video editing room and network several of my 20 Amigas together to create my own render farm.

I have a huge investment in my equipment and software and have no plans to sell or junk my investment and purchase LightWave for the PC yet.  If I can actually make some money with my existing "Hobby" equipment, then I may take that money to buy some newer software and hardware to hopefully make even more money.

I will post my progress here to let you know what I find out about setting up the render farm.

[Piru]

Well, in my opinion single PC + lightwave would be
a) faster
b) cheaper
c) more energy efficient
d) more uptodate (better software, tools etc)
than render-farm of 20 Amigas.

If you have the skills to actually make money from your renders then the PC would be much more sensible investment.

@motorollin

Frankly, amiga is not very suitable for render farms, and in particular these days when a single PC can easily beat 20 amiga render farm. Just trying to give some sound advice here.

[HellCoder]

20 Amiga's ?
WOw...
what are the configurations ?

As for networking, you should have some sort of connection between all those Amiga's. Otherwise the networking software doesn't know automatically what to send to which amiga, if there is such software though.

Do you have them all networked ?
If not, than it will be hard to handle as you have so many!

[bloodline]

motorollin wrote:

Piru wrote:
Um, how about using a single PC to replace the farm of amigas?

Um, how about answering a perfectly good Amiga-related question instead of discouraging him? Maybe a PC would do it better, but if we all stopped using our Amigas for the things which other platforms do better then this site wouldn't be here.

--
moto

To be Fair Moto... the Amiga was never that great for building Render farms... The Amiga served better as the set-up and control machine... leave the boring number crunching to cheap faceless whiteboxes!

Piru is quite right that the idea of using that many Amiga's now is a very wasteful idea;

1. Expensive, Amiga's are not cheap... networking them can get stupidly expensive too.
2. Dangerous, why stress a whole bunch of 15 year old machines which don't have much life span left for no reason.
3. Poluting, 20 Amiga's will burn 20 times more power than one modern PC.
4. Slow, 20 Amiga's will be much slower and probably output a lower resolution than a single modern PC.
5. Out of date software... 3D rendering software has come one leaps and bounds in the past 15 years.

If you have the money and the free sapce... then it would be an interesting peice of living archiology... but nothing more.

[gazgod]

To be Fair Moto... the Amiga was never that great for building Render farms... The Amiga served better as the set-up and control machine... leave the boring number crunching to cheap faceless whiteboxes!

Acctually in the days of amiga render farms the backend boxes were not faceless white boxes but usually pleasantly coloured SGI machines.

[Crom00]

Here is a tip.

Keep say 3 Amigas with all the best replacent parts and all the spares you think you will need.

Sell the rest on ebay...Take the proceeds from your sales and go to a site like www.geeks.com, Newegg.com or EBAY and for $3000-$4000 you can assemble a render farm consisting of 8-12 cheap Tawianese motherboard based PC systems.

Your render farm will be much more productive. Even an office pc, or a medica center pc can logon and become another machine in the render farm when not in use.

Babylon 5 was rendered on Amigas only for the first few seasons. They were all to happy to switch to cheap fast always on PC's the moment lightwave became available on PC.

One of the original BABYLON 5 era Amiga 2000's now sits in DAVESCHOOL, a Lighteave VFX school on Orlando florida. When any of the students complian how "slow" pc's are, they're told about the good old days waiting 5 days to render a logo animation that now takes 30 minutes with all fx turned on.

[ltstanfo]

trekiej wrote:
This question has probably been asked alot.
Is there a website dedicated to an Amiga Render Farm or has anyone here built one.
I have read on a site that you would have to have Queing software.
Networking for amiga is , I hear, expensive due to lack of hardware, except for using Elbox expansion boards.
Any info would be appreciated.
Thanks.

Ahh...now here is a topic that I have not seen discussed in a VERY long time.  AMIGAs were used in render farm configurations back in the early / mid 90's when they were the best (ie most affordable) systems available.  The first season of B5 (Babylon 5) used Amiga render farms to generate much of the exterior shots of the show (space, ships, station, etc..).  The software of choice was of course NewTek Toaster / Flyer.  I'm not aware of anyone still using the AMIGA in such a manner today so your project might be interesting to watch.

If you can find him, Tigger is a great person to ask about this topic.  He has lots of experience in this area.

Regards,
Ltstanfo

[guru-666]

o.k firstly to answer your question.
-sceamernet is the software that runs the cue, it is built into lightwave... still is I think (don't use it much anymore)

secondly,
amiga's where NOT popular in renderfarms ever. Right around the time Babylon was being done lightwave was ported to PC just becasue amiga renderfarms where to expensive and slow.  

Also Babylon 5 was NOT rendered on amigas for the first two seasons, it was only the pilot that used them.......you see the amiga was loosing ground even back then!  Amiga where expencive NOT cheap!

lastly, for fun it may be cool to set up an amiga render fram, for productivity it would be retarded.

Also nothing form elbox is need or recomended, all you need an ethernet card like and x-surf which will cost you $120 IF you can find one (let alone 20x)

Still as a 3d guy, I would love to see/hear about your amiga render farm... I may even connect my 4000t and 4000d just for kicks but I need a second ethernet card.. and I tend to jam my systems full of zoro cards so I don't even know if I have enough space. LOL.

[amigadave]

Piru wrote:
Well, in my opinion single PC + lightwave would be
a) faster
b) cheaper
c) more energy efficient
d) more uptodate (better software, tools etc)
than render-farm of 20 Amigas.

If you have the skills to actually make money from your renders then the PC would be much more sensible investment.

@motorollin

Frankly, amiga is not very suitable for render farms, and in particular these days when a single PC can easily beat 20 amiga render farm. Just trying to give some sound advice here.

I agree that all of the above is true, and I do have one Intel Core 2 Duo 2.33gHz w/2gb RAM that could run LightWave for Windows, but I don't have the skills to make money from my rendered animations and until I learn to use my existing Amiga LightWave 5.0 better and see that I can possibly make some money with it (as it is just a hobby now) I don't think it is worthwhile for me to spend another $795 to purchase LightWave 9.2.

An Amiga render farm makes sense for me, as I have everything already, the 8 to 10 68040 or faster big box Amigas with ethernet cards, etc.

Another big reason to use an Amiga render farm is to partly justify the insanity of spending so much money over the last 15+ years collecting all this Amiga hardware and software.  :lol:   Amiga has always been about being able to do more with less resources.  I want to see what I can create with my Amigas.  

Also I want to teach, or allow teens and young adults interested in 3D design and video editing to use my many Amigas to learn how to get started in this field.  Then they can move up to more powerful and modern systems if they want to continue their learning.  That is one thing that can't be done by many users on one workstation.

I have a friend that still makes 90% of his income on one Amiga A2000 w/Toaster 4000 & Flyer system.  He talks about moving to a newer different PC system, but the results he can produce on his Toaster/Flyer are still better than most other "so called" small time video editor/producers that he competes against.

But that is off topic, as he does not use LightWave much in his business, so fast render times are not critical.

[Crom00]

Amigas were used on Babylon 5, Seaquest, and ST:TNG-ST:Voyager around 94-95.
 
Actually a rendering computer in a custom case was built by Newtek to handle the rendering problem but sales were not great. It was more cost effective to run Lightwave on PC. It had an interesting case design, in the same style of the Play Trinity case but more of a Tower design.

 By 1994-1995 with the death of Commodore Lightwave was unbuddled from the Amiga toaster and released to PC with Version 4 where it was being used for shows like Sapce Above and Beyond, Hypernauts and others.

[Tomas]

Piru wrote:
Um, how about using a single PC to replace the farm of amigas?

For many Amigans this would take the magic away. It is just to prove that such a task can still be done on our aging hardware. I dont see why not, as long as you have multiple amigas or/and the time/patience.