Time for a bit of blatant self promotion on a new venture I have been working on the last few months.

I have been working to build a small render farm for network rendering Modo 501 scenes.  Also have built a high-end workstation for rendering SolidWorks 2011 PhotoView 360 files.  I am hoping to market the farm as a service to users to off load some of their rendering tasks on those jobs that are a bit to big for their workstations.

The name of my new venture is RenderBay LLC.

All the computers are up and running on the render farm.  I am in soft launch mode, slowly going out to potential customers to work out the bugs in the farm and hopefully start to build a customer base.

Added a dual socket, overclocked, water-cooled Xeon X5690 system to the farm over the Memorial Day holiday weekend. It is running stable at 4.4 Ghz with 12 physical core and another 12 virtual cores.  I have Modo 501 and SolidWorks 2011 PhotoView 360 installed on the system.  This will be my PV360 render node for those that need to farm out PV360 tasks.  It is a nice compliment to the other render nodes I have for Modo.

With all my render nodes up and running I will have 150 Ghz plus hyper-threading available for Modo jobs.  For PV360 there is 53 Ghz plus hyper-threading available. I plan to not charge for hyper-threading. Rates will be 2/4/8 cents a Ghz Hr for low/medium/high priority rendering on the farm.

This is not a huge farm by any stretch, I am focusing on SolidWorks users that use PV360 and Modo in their workflow.  I will consider some of the other rendering packages like Blender, Maxwell, Shot and Keyshot if there is enough demand to justify the time and software investment.

You can find out more details about the farm at www.RenderBay.com

Cheers,

Anna

Doing a speed test with the SpiderBot-Animated_01.lxo animation file found in the Modo 501 Sample directory.

3 nodes of my Core i7 2600 machines (24 threads at 3.4 ghz) versus my dual socket Xeon X5690 machine (24 threads at 4.4 ghz).

The Core i7 machines are smoking the Xeon system. Speaks well of distributed computing for rendering animation frames.

The performance of the Core i7 2600′s are great. Very happy with these low cost render nodes.

Final results:
Core i7 2600: 02h 20m 57s
2x Xeon X5690: 03h 28m18s

Pretty amazing……..