[Bf-cycles] help with testing Blender on new hardware

[Brecht Van Lommel]

Hi Piotr,

Performance testing and analysis on the latest GPU's and Xeon Phi
would be quite useful, though at the moment I don't have much time for
this. From the point of view of developers I'd say there isn't much
difference between NVidia Titan, 7xx, Tesla or Quadro cards based on
the same architecture, I expect them to all behave similar, just with
different number of cores or memory available.

It would be useful in general to have SSH access to some server with
such cards set up, but at the moment I can't really promise that I
will have time to do serious testing on them.

For benchmarks, the Barcelona and BMW scenes are used often.
http://www.emirage.org/
https://svn.blender.org/svnroot/bf-blender/trunk/lib/tests/cycles/

Thanks,
Brecht.

On Thu, Jun 27, 2013 at 12:42 PM, Piotr Arlukowicz <piotao at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello there,
>
> As some of you probably know, the YABC-2013 Conference in Poland was
> sponsored by Fujitsu. Now this sponsor is interested in awesome Blender
> community (it see the "potential") and it could possibbly offer some hi-end
> workstations with additional equipment for testing. They will be located in
> some secure place in Poland, however, they will be accessible by the
> network, via ssh for example.
> The testing and benchmarking Blender I'll do anyway, but I want to ask you
> what will be good for devs (if somebody will be interested) for testing. I
> hope Fujitsu can lend us some newest graphic cards and we can test Blender
> in diffrent configurations, ie. diffrent SLI modes. The equipment I hope to
> have for testing is hi-end NVIDIA cards, namely Tesla, K6000, K5000, Titan,
> etc. The things I've already saw were promising, the new Quadro K5000 was
> able to compete with GTX Titan, but the its price is totally different. I
> had too few time for testing during the YABC conference, unfortunately. Now
> I will have the second chance.
>
> So I plan to setup some machines using Linux, put the hardware inside,
> install CUDA 5 and baseutils dev environ, and test thoroughly SVN Blender.
> Maybe some dev will join me :)
> I'll need also some benchmark files as well as some hints for setup and
> configuration. It would be nice to help the community in this way. Also in
> November I'll gain the access to machine with Xeon Phi coprocessor and
> testing Blender on it will be also possible.
>
> Of course I'm asking what should I ask Fujitsu and which hardware is worth
> to be testing and with what.
> The base barebone is R920 workstation, with 2 independent 8-core Xeon CPU,
> with 32GB ram or more. Are you guys interested in some specific equipment
> and working in this direction at all?
>
> best regards to all
> piotr
> Polish Blender Course
> PL: http://polskikursblendera.pl
> YABC2013: http://polskikursblendera.pl/yabc2013/en/
>
> --
> Piotr Arlukowicz
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