The RANCH renderfarm now supports Indigo!

[fused]

Nice one, Fred.

That is pretty cool

[RenderFred]

Hi everyone,

I am pleased to announce that from now onwards, all Indigo projects will be processed on our RANCH Runner.



The new system is 2.5 to 3 times as fast as the 'old' RANCH (which could hardly be considered slow). You can see some benchmarks here and our latest Newsletter here

Good things to know:

- a project which took one hour of render time is now done in around 20-25 minutes.
- we can render super-heavy projects as each RR node has 24 GB RAM.
- the gathering+merging phase is also 2.5 times faster, which means that a full merging from all the RANCH Runner nodes takes 8 minutes with 2 GB IGIs, when it took 20 minutes before.
- the IGI size limit that we can process (2.5 GB) is now increased to 5 GB.

This massive speed increase does not cost more to our customers. In fact on many projects it costs less!

The supercomp is driven by proprietary software developed internally, which ensures fast reactivity and maximum optimization.

We hope you will love this performance increase as a great way to boost your productivity... and sell more renders to your customers

See you on the RANCH!

Fred

[Soup]

Niiice, do want!

[zeitmeister]

Great!

One little thing about the cost estimator:
I am missing all actual Mac Pro processor configurations.

For example in my case I've got two 2.66 GHz Quad-Core Xeons in my machine... and I can't find any Quad-Core processor in your processor selector.

Maybe it would nice if you can update that one?

[RenderFred]

Great!

One little thing about the cost estimator:
I am missing all actual Mac Pro processor configurations.

For example in my case I've got two 2.66 GHz Quad-Core Xeons in my machine... and I can't find any Quad-Core processor in your processor selector.

Maybe it would nice if you can update that one?

I presume you are talking about non-Indigo cost estimators? (the way to estimate for cooperative Indigo projects is there.

For the other, animation-based estimators, there are indeed a lot of quad-core Xeons in the list... If you know the model of your Xeons (53??, 54??, etc.) there is a good chance you will find them.

[RenderFred]

Hi,

the Blitz! formula is online and valid until February 28th. The Blitz! is a FREE 5-minute run on the RANCH Runner - that corresponds approximately to a 4 hours render on a 12-core MacPro workstation, or 10 hours on a Core i7 PC.
Do not miss it, all the details are here. And did I mention it is FREE?

Cheers,

Fred

[Zom-B]

If you have a 2.6.1 Exporter with glass_acceleration, make sure to delete this line in the igs before packing the scene to work properly!

I just tested the Blitz! and have to say that was some really, really intense 5 minutes
Awesome result, I'll try some more until the 28th to get a good feeling for the Ranch!

Thanks!

[Lemo]

I'm definitely gonna give that a try :]

[pixie]

It kept telling me that I have an invalid file, despite running perfectly in my setup (the pigs)

[Zom-B]

It kept telling me that I have an invalid file, despite running perfectly in my setup (the pigs)

See:

If you have a 2.6.1 Exporter with glass_acceleration, make sure to delete this line in the igs before packing the scene to work properly!

The Ranch runs latest Stable build not the 2.6.1 version...

[pixie]

It kept telling me that I have an invalid file, despite running perfectly in my setup (the pigs)

See:

If you have a 2.6.1 Exporter with glass_acceleration, make sure to delete this line in the igs before packing the scene to work properly!

The Ranch runs latest Stable build not the 2.6.1 version...

I've turned it off, but perhaps it sets it to false, I'll try again though... thanks

[Zom-B]

I've turned it off, but perhaps it sets it to false, I'll try again though... thanks

Turning it off sets the parameter to false but its still a unknown parameter for older Indigo versions and so Indigo don't start properly...

My thoughts about this are that unknown parameters should be traced by Indigo in the console but be ignored.
By this you get better downward compatibility!

[Soup]

It would be good going forward to do this, but doesn't help older versions at all

[Zom-B]

but doesn't help older versions at all

Actually it would allow to run scenes exported by newer Exporters on older Indigo versions, but yes:
Just from the point of implementation, someday in future when this is a "old version"

[Bosseye]

I'd love to try the Ranch, but I can't from work - part of our ISP security is blocking me from uploading a project to the farm under 'category prohibited hacking' which is a shame.

So I'll have to try this on my laptop perhaps at home. Certainly its something I'd love to try out, will be interesting to see just how far a 5 min render goes. May be something we can take advantage of at work for urgent jobs.