[Bf-committers] Raspberry Pi render farm

Alexandr Kuznetsov kuzsasha at gmail.com
Sun Feb 19 06:23:19 CET 2012


Hi.
It can be totally possible to compile arm version of Blender. But here is
my concerns:
1. Memory. Complex scenes require a big amount of memory for textures and
geometry. For example most scenes from Sintel requeries 8 gb for full
render.
2. Performance per watt. Arm is usually is more efficient than x86, but it
might be not be the case with cheap arm or with full cpu load. Plus x86 use
sse2/3 optimizations and have bigger cache. So you need to test what is
cheaper electricity wise.

Best Regards
Alex

On Sat, Feb 18, 2012 at 11:55 PM, Campbell Barton <ideasman42 at gmail.com>wrote:

> 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
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