ATTN: Hamachi Network Distributed Rendering Test!

[kououken]

I've been really fired up about the idea of shared processing/rendering since discovering Indigo, and have been looking for a way to bring together those making brilliant, processor-taxing indigo scenes, and those with a spare core/cpu or two!

At lego's suggestion, I have set up a virtual private network with Hamachi (nothing to it!) specifically for those who are interested in sharing/borrowing processor power for Indigo rendering. I have a couple PCs in my home that need to be on 24/7, but at the same time their CPUs sit around most of the day totally unused. There may be many other people on the forums who are in a similar situation, so lets put some of those lost cycles to use and render some beautiful scenes!

For those of you who are interested, download the latest Hamachi version at http://www.hamachi.cc/download/. Set your screenname ( same as the Indigo forums would be handy ) and join the "indigorenderer" network, password is "indigorenderer". There are always risks with opening your computer up to new connections on the internet, but in my experience Hamachi has been excellent.

Once you're online, others logged in at that time will show up in your windows network neighborhood, and you can browse the fileshares of those who have enabled them. I made a sample share on my PC, "ryououki" that you can take a look at. Users of the same network can send text messages, so you can invite people to help out with renders/etc.

It may be hard to organize the requests while keeping track of which renders are starting/finishing, but for the time being, I'd just like to test the feasability of an online rendering network. If it goes well, we could maybe think about setting up a forum section for render requests.

Please, respond with any thoughts/suggestions on how to make this work. For the time being anways, my main comp is online in the Hamachi network waiting for something to render. Hope to see you there. Maybe we can finally get rid of that grain that "just doesn't go away".. Good photos DO have grain, but GREAT photos are taken on medium/large-format cameras whose film is so big grain doesn't matter anymore. Let's render some of THOSE!

[OnoSendai]

Wow,
crazy stuff!
I'll have a read about hamachi tomorrow

[kououken]

Ono-Sendai, are you signed up for an RSS feed I don't know about? How do you respond so fast?!

[OnoSendai]

heh.. just whoring the forum while waiting for renders

[joegiampaoli]

hmmmm, Hamachi Network, I'll give it a try later. Thanks kououken!

[[kothe]]

I'm online... almost anytime

[lego]

I installed hamachi for linux, but it's console only...
no chat, no shared folders... it may be a little difficult to use it

[eman7613]

I'm afraid i cant partake. although comast gives us a lot of bandwidth, the internet notoriously goes out and slows down to being unusable (daily, on its own, no dling needed)

[skypa]

I installed hamachi for linux, but it's console only...
no chat, no shared folders... it may be a little difficult to use it

Well, I don't know about text messages, but it's a piece of cake to setup a samba share as a "shared folder" to use with hamachi.
I use ssh to tunnel Indigo from the distributed clients to my server. Since ssh supports encryption and compression, it's quite handy for network rendering over WAN, plus X-forwarding allows to run clients to my liking without the need of VNC or crappy "Remote Desktop".
To sum up, I'm very glad Indigo runs with wine, although it's probably too much geek-tech for most users present.

[lego]

I installed hamachi for linux, but it's console only...
no chat, no shared folders... it may be a little difficult to use it

Well, I don't know about text messages, but it's a piece of cake to setup a samba share as a "shared folder" to use with hamachi.
I use ssh to tunnel Indigo from the distributed clients to my server. Since ssh supports encryption and compression, it's quite handy for network rendering over WAN, plus X-forwarding allows to run clients to my liking without the need of VNC or crappy "Remote Desktop".
To sum up, I'm very glad Indigo runs with wine, although it's probably too much geek-tech for most users present.

could you make a very simple guide for everyone?
how to setup a shared folder for hamachi and see the other users' shared folders?

[kououken]

First official render on the Hamachi Indigo renderering network. (Let's not make any silly acronyms) It was only me and Kothe doing the rendering, but the test was successful.. the only problem is, I used a really huge (50mb) xml file, and it didn't get very pretty overnight, but the shares and network connections all went smoothly. Here's the render:



Hopefully we'll get some more people popping in (maybe someone with some REAL artwork to render!) and can try this with lots of users connected.

Simple guide follows:

As far as setting up the shares and connecting to each other, I found that setting windows xp to "simple" sharing made things really easy. If you'd like to do that, open up my computer and select Tools > Folder Options > View > and under advanced settings at the bottom, set to simple file sharing. This lets you just drag folders you want to share into another "Shared Documents" (i believe) folder inside "My Computer."

Once you have hamachi up and running, and log into "indigorenderer" network, password "indigorenderer"... other people logged in will appear inside your network places, or under Entire Network > Windows Network. Browsing around you should find us.

To help someone else's render, for example mine:

1. open my shared folder in network places and grab the xml file. In this case, "parts.xml" and drop it in your indigo folder (newest test version),

2. Start up a command prompt by doing Start > Run > "cmd"

3. Start up your indigo client in slave mode by typing "indigo parts.xml -n s -h ryououki"

That should do it.. "parts.xml" is the name of the file to render, the "-n s" setting tells indigo to start as a network slave, and "-h ryououki" tells it to connect to host ryououki (my comp, though it's not up and running right now)

To run your own render, use the command "indigo filename.xml -n m" to begin a server as network master, and it will open up and begin waiting for frames. This server only listens for slaves, and it won't render anything itself, so if you want to render at the same time, start ANOTHER instance of indigo with the "-n s" network slave setting, and "-h yourcomputername" to connect to yourself and begin rendering.

Right now there's no way for a slave to watch the progression of the render on the master server (even a local rendering option would be nice! T_T) but I suppose efficiency and practicality, as well as bug-lessness are top priorities at this stage in development.

Indigo renders are the greatest eyecandy EVER! I wish I could see more!

Peace all,

[skypa]

For the love of god, compress your xml files. They're pure ASCII and thus compress very niceley (factor 8).
Regarding network shares under Linux. If you use Ubuntu, simply right click the directory you want to share and share them as "SMB". It'll setup all necessary dependencies for that.

I really think the master should be able to somehow validate the integrity of the client. As of know you can feed a completely garbaged scene to the master and it'll merge it non-reversible into the image.

edit:
By the way, why not share your "indigo/renders" directory read-only. It'll enable slaves to monitor the progression of the render easily.

[kououken]

I took your advice.. Now have the indigo folder shared read-only. Good idea! You can open up the render in acdsee, and just hit refresh to see the updated render!

Now, how do I go about compressing these monster xmls?

[skypa]

Now, how do I go about compressing these monster xmls?

Zip 'em, RAR 'em, it really doesn't matter, they'll end up a lot smaller in any case.

[kououken]

One more test render out of the hamachi "renderfarm" ... more like a rendergarden right now, but it works!

Indigo once again blows me away by recreating exactly what a scene would look like in real life. Almost scary really! Don't have to worry about photons, shadow buffers, etc. while modeling.

Take a look!



A WORKING optical fiber! Plain old IOR 1.5 glass, with a light emitter at one end and nothing at the other.
I gotta try making a laser cavity next!