[Bf-committers] Raspberry Pi render farm

[Campbell Barton]

On Sun, Feb 19, 2012 at 3:27 PM, Markus Schulz <schulz at alpharesearch.de> wrote:
> I was wondering if this ARM computer that can run Debian could be used to build a render farm. It only cost $35 with Ethernet, it only needs 5V and it only uses around 2 watts as far as I understand.
> I just guess it would need a lot less power than the PC solution at the Blender Institute right now. Getting several hundred would not be out of range and I also guess the savings in power would make up for it... anyway I'm not sure if this would be possible but I wanted to put this thought out in the open:
> http://www.raspberrypi.org/
> For example, maybe it would be a nice side project for Mango to build a open source render farm based on Raspberry Pi...
> Regards,
> Markus Schulz

Sure, blender runs on arm fine (or did last I checked at least).

you might want to build a stripped down version that runs in headless
mode (since the device has limited memory).

With such low end systems you limit how much memory the scenes can use
so having lots of systems in that case doesn't help too much (256mb
isnt too much when it comes to detailed 3d scenes).

-- 
- Campbell