Carrara Render Nodes
Pennyfarman
Posts: 32
Can anyone help? I have been reading some helpful tips in several other threads on Carrara render nodes. However I couldn't find the solution to the problem I'm having. I have four computers networked (8 cores each), I couldn't get all four computers to respond as "working" in Carrara progess Statastics tab. It says "available" only on two computers, other two computers says "working". Any idea why that is? It would be nice to see more "N". See all four "Working" and speed up rendering. Thanks!
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It sounds like a possible Grid limitation, although I would expect 3 out of the 4 to work, not just 2. Carrara has a built-in limitation of 20 cores for network rendering, but when I first ran into it I was able to get 24 cores rendering ok, since it seems to ignore the number of cores on the primary computer and starts counting up cores on the nodes instead. Therefore (presuming when you said 8 cores per computer you really meant 4 cores with hyperthreading to 8 threads, and as Carrara appears to count each thread as a core) you would have 8 threads on your primary computer, then 16 threads on 2 of the nodes, but since the 3rd node would raise the number of threads on the nodes to 24 and above the limitation of 20, it ignores the last computer which will show as 'available' but not 'working' (the computers that are actually being used for rendering show as 'working' when rendering.
I bought the Grid license to unlock more network rendering cores (product claims up to 100 cores, but so far no matter what I do I can't seem to get above 88 cores, not a great tragedy since that's more than plenty for my purpose, but frustrating nonetheless) and no longer hit the limitation.
Also keep in mind that your nodes will only show as 'working' when they are rendering, so for example if you've got a very low powered node that takes much longer than your primary machine to run calculations for the scene, that your primary computer might already be working/rendering for some time before the node eventually finishes its calculation and 'joins in', switching from merely 'available' to 'working'.
Thanks Jonstark. Looking at the bigger picture, obviously Carrara intentionally set limitation on Render Nodes (20 cores) to tempt artists to buy Grid. Grid is $200 just for allowing more cores (100 cores) to open up? Oh my!
So you are saying there's no way around it unless I buy Grid? I rather wait unitl it hits Fast Grab, I ain't breaking my bank.
Thanks for your indepth input!
Yeah definitely worth waiting, it will come up for sale at some point (I didn't pay $200 for it, I think I paid $125, which is still pretty hefty though)
Interesting real world information - thanks Jonstark!
Question: IF you have more than one legit Carrara licenses/installations around your house... is there anyway to consolidate/activate the 20 cores each? If you start the render engine with a local Carrara, then connect to it from a remote 'master' I wonder if you can get the counters to somehow appreciate their local licenses but render for another host, etc...
FWIW, I've seen grid down to under $60-ish a couple of times in the last few years, but you have to watch for it... I wonder where the 88 number comes from?
cheers,
--ms
I'm not sure if there's a way to do that, but it would fun if you could. I've got licenses for Carrara 7 and 8, as well as 8.5, would be fun to combine them if there was a way.
I actually even raised a ticket with Daz themselves about the 88 core limitation I was running into, the response led me to believe they weren't sure themselves, made me wonder if I was the first person ever to try to assemble a render farm with 100 cores :)
I will soon be able to test this out as I will have 3 Z820 workstations each with a total of 32 Threads so that will give me 96 threads on those three leaving my i7 to work on normally.
Sweet! I'm hyped because I'm about to pick up a z620 and put 2 e5-2680s in it, I can only wish in awe I could get 3 820s :)
Quick update, I got the z620, put a pair of e5-2690's in it (for 32 render cores) and have now tested using it as the main app, combined with a z600 with 24 render cores, a d20 with 24 cores, a z600 with 16 cores, and my main desktop (well, prior to the z620, which will now be my main computer from now on) which has an i7-6700 with 8 render cores.
I don't know why, but I'm not running into the 88 render core limit anymore. On my first test I was able to render getting 96 render cores, and it would use everything but my i7-6700 desktop. I was of course very pleased with this result, but thought maybe I was running into a 100 core render limit that Grid has, since if the full 8 rendercores from the i7 were included, that would push things to 104 cores, or just over the limit. (see the 1st 2 screenshots below).
So I went into the bios of the i7-6700 and disabled hyper-threading, taking the number of render cores down to just 4, the render my test scene again. Success! I was able to get all render nodes working and 100 render cores of rendering goodness.
Very happy! (see the 2nd 2 screenshots)
I have no idea why this is working now when it wasn't previously, I should add that the z620 with the dual e5-2690's is running Windows 10 (I had to copy/paste my Carrara 8.5 from one of the Windows 7 render nodes which already had Grid installed, as Daz still hasn't fixed the downloads/installer for Grid to work with Windows 10).
I'm wondering if it was simply my i7-6700 desktop, which had lots of other janky problems. For instance, it would only run 2/3 of the Oculus games I bought, the others would just hang. And I had constant problems with the mouse stuttering on that desktop too.
Now with the dual Xeon z620, even though I get a pop-up in the Oculus home warning me that I'm not running what is officially a 'strong' enough cpu (the e5-2690's are 2.9 ghz but can turbo up to 3.8 at need), every game works just fine, in fack better than ever, and lots of other programs are working better too. Perhaps Sandy Bridge era tech trumps Skylake? Lol. I'm just pleased I've finally got a main driver that is performing so well, though I did have to update the z620 bios, chipset, and graphics drivers in order to get the nvidia GTX 1070 I installed to work, but other than that it's been smooth sailing. Next big task is installing Octane onto the z620, and I should finally be ready to jump back into Carrara fun times again.
By the by, all of the dual Xeon rigs (especially the main one) blow my supposedly super-fast i7-6700 out of the water in terms of rendering speeds. Xeons FTW!
Great! Obviously the rendering is faster than transfering the renderdata to the nodes.
Jon, thanks for updating. I read most of the other thread a couple of weeks ago, and was hoping that you would update here.
The comments from you and others about the benefits of dual xeons and workstations have caused me to rethink what to plan for in an ultimate Carrara machine.
Really useful information. Please keep those updates coming. The pictures of all those cores working... just awesome!
He (jonstark) has an excellent thread on the subject:
Building my own little render farm on the cheap
Thanks Dart. At first I thought that you meant this thread, but you were talking about an even earlier one.
So, it appears that DustRider provided some of the impetus to look into xeon workstations. Very nice of him.
From all of this reading, I'm getting the idea that dual xeon workstations are ideal for the Carrara native render engine, while high-end Nvidia cards are better for Octane. Is that correct?
BTW - I found this artice which compares an older dual xeon setup, price and performance, to the most current i7. Pretty impressive!
http://www.techspot.com/review/1155-affordable-dual-xeon-pc/
That's actrually the one I was looking for! LOL
That's exactly what I've found to be true. I use both Carrara native and the Octane plugin, so it was important for me to put together a main rig optimized for both. I was initially worried that with the older tech of the dual Xeon I was using that maybe it would have trouble working with the new Pascal Nvidia cards, but after a quick bios/chipset/graphics drivers update from the HP site my GTX1070 works beautifully with no problems. I've seen other stuff on the web that suggests that the z600's work fine with the latest Nvidia cards too, so while I spent a bit more than necessary to get a z620 to have 32 rendering threads, it's fairly easy to get a z600 on the super cheap from ebay, put in some dual 6 cores and have a 24 render core machine that can also support running Octane just fine.
That article you linked was the same one that made me want to upgrade to a 32 render core machine. I found it was less expensive to simply purchase a used workstation (the z620 in this case) than try to purchase and assemble all the various parts, but one drawback is that I don't think my motherboard will let me overclock anything. Not that I care, as I have no need to overclock; the z620 runs all of my programs with no issues, and I can even play all my Oculus games with it.
Yes! I want an HP Z600, 620, 800 or so with dual hexa-core Xeon and Windows 7 Pro!!!
Have I mentioned it's my Birthday this month?
Lately I've slacked off on my mania of watching eBay for deals, but I'll be on the lookout, maybe I can point you to a sweet deal if (when) one pops up :)
A similar article, but 20 cores and newer Broadwell Xeon CPUs, though only ES models are low priced:
http://www.techspot.com/review/1218-affordable-40-thread-xeon-monster-pc/
This page the the Cinebench benchmark, which is the closest to Carrara rendering:
http://www.techspot.com/review/1218-affordable-40-thread-xeon-monster-pc/page4.html
Man, they sell refurbs of these at Newegg!!! I'm probably getting mine from there! ;)
But thanks for the offer. As long as you're off of e-bay... let's keep you off! You have enough now! Time to play in Carrara and make more fun!
Fricken OUCH! Are you people reading this article? What a MONSTER!
If I was building a budget for a new computer - this is the route I'd go, for sure. Still, when on a low budget, these powerhouses of yesteryear are still an amazing solution for Carrara and, what I like even more, is that I can find them with Windows 7 Pro. I know that my laptop would perform much better running 7, but the drivers aren't available. :(
Man, these guys did a great job of spending low coin and building a real beast!
In their tests, it does still show the power behind Intel's new 10 core i7. Yeah... it rocks. But these dual 10 core Xeons are certainly made to make Carrara shine!!!
I love it that they develop stuff just for us, Carraraists, don't you?
Jon, that is great to hear! I want an optimized rig for both as well, as I plan on taking the plunge on Octane within the next few months.
I only know enough about computers to be dangerous. However, I have a local computer store that I trust, and they will assemble the machine for a very low cost if I specify or supply the parts. If I go with a used machine instead, the store owner has said that he prefers Dell workstations over HP, and one reason was that HP is apparently very picky about what memory you use.
3drendero, thanks for that newer article! Food for thought. A bit more expensive for parts, but it's nice to know the options. Gotta dream big.
While they may be right on that, these HP workstations made a BIG name for themselves in the CG/VFX industry and were sought out as the best thing on the market in several animating books I've seen from that (only a few years ago) era. They were thousands of dollars then, now we're seeing them for only a couple hundred bucks. Makes it easy to want one!
I knew nothing about building computers when I started frequenting this forum. A young college fellow I was training at work (Construction) brought a folder full of printouts every day, examining the parts he was going to order so he could build his next gaming computer. I said the same thing you did: "I only know enough about computers to be dangerous"
He printed up an extra copy of everything the next day and gave me a stack of his prints. Just products from computer vendors - most of them from Newegg.
At Newegg, we can 'build a computer' in a Wishlist. We still need to look things up, but we basically need to match up which motherboard to get for the cpu(s), graphics, RAM capacity, etc., we want to use, get memory(RAM) that matches the motherboard's specs, power supply, and anything else we want to include, like a box the right size to hold everything and keep it cool (remember, sometimes we let these renders go on for long periods where the cpu(s) will be running Wide-freaking-Open!!!)
I liked this Wishlist idea so much (we can create separate, custom wish lists) that I just decided to buy everything right from Newegg.
When I had questions, I'd copy the name of what I wanted to look into and paste it into the search engine. All kinds of geeky threads available - many of which answer the question right away.
I even got into overclocking for a while - then just decided not to. CPUs are fast enough for me as they come out of the box. Why add the extra worry of burnign the things up, right?
I can't get Carrara to use Render Nodes on one of our computers. It's a Windows 10 whereas all the others which are working are Windows 7.
I can see the Nodes available but it never actually works or runs. Also, it becomes unreachable if I try again and kicks the Render Nodes off and stops responding.
I've disconnected my firewall to see if the firewall was blocking it, I've checked to insure all the versions were the same, I've tried inserting specific serial number into Render Nodes, etc.
I've tried wireless and hardwired into our network as well.
Has anyone else had this issue? Is it a Windows 10 compatibility issue?