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I am a 3D artist and I work with very, very large scenes, around 100GB per scene is normal. My workstation doesn't have enough memory to render these scenes itself, and I am unfamiliar with what sort of system architecture is required to support rendering such large scenes.

I'm considering building a cluster with multiple nodes working in tandem on a single project so that it can utilize sufficient memory to process these large projects. I've read about Beowulf but I'm not sure if it works for rendering 3D art.

Is a Beowulf cluster the right type of setup for me or is there something else that will work for rendering these projects?

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Also, there are Renderfarms "for hire", like Rebus: rebusfarm.net/index.php/en | Of course, that's up to you to calculate the costs of which is cheaper. || < || I don't know Rebus, nor any of the other farms. But there are plenty of them out there. Do a google search for "Renderfarm", and you might find something cheap which fits your need. Building a complete cluster for rendering is OK since you can use it later for any kind of project. But you also have to maintain it, upgrade it occasionally. Which makes it a bit costly. Again. Math part. –  Shiki Feb 25 '12 at 17:21
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Renderfarms are a common thing. Even typing "How to build a renderfarm" gives you a lot of examples.

I'll just post the Tomshardware link here. I know, copy all the information out. But it is 8 pages long. And I never seen any Tomshardware link just disappear, or an article to get deleted. So ... here we go:


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I'm not sure, but I already read this article, and it is very superficial, and it says that each node holds a different frame, so I will need that each node would have at least 100gb of ram, but I think that it is very expensive and unreal, I'm trying to build a render farm where all nodes hold the same job, so the ram will be cumulative. thanks. –  drigoSkalWalker Feb 25 '12 at 17:25
Hmm. I think you can simply stuff 128gb memory into one server. Just get a Rack server from HP/Sun/any company, and buy a LOT of memory. You can also put in 2 CPUs (8 core each one maybe?). –  Shiki Feb 26 '12 at 14:22
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