28 Apr
2015
28 Apr
'15
2:43 p.m.
An inexpensive render farm is exactly why I got DCP-o-matic compiled on the Pi 2.
So far, adding a single Raspberry Pi 2 increased my encode speed by an additional frame
per second. I’m working on adding a second Pi 2, so we’ll see if the performance increase
is linear.
I’m sure I haven’t optimized the compiled code very well, so with some work we could
probably squeeze more performance out of DCP-o-matic.
One benefit I see to using the Pi is that I can easily expand the “farm” one unit at a
time as I can afford it, rather than having to shell out for a single big box. Plus, if
one goes bad, I can easily replace it. If a single big server goes down, my whole render
server is gone.
-David
On Apr 28, 2015, at 4:54 AM, Jim Dummett via DCPomatic
<dcpomatic(a)carlh.net> wrote:
Hi David.
This is really interesting. What kind of performance are you getting from it?
I have been wondering about if it might be a viable option to make a kind of render farm
out of 20-50 Raspberry Pi, and whether that'd work out cheaper in terms of processing
power per buck than buying one big fast multi-processor machine.
Jim
On 27/04/2015 22:36, David Nedrow via DCPomatic wrote:
I’ve been able to compile DCP-o-matic on
Raspberry Pi 2’s using the Raspian disk image. I had to install a few packages and
compile/install a couple of third party libraries. I also had to make some changes to the
script file to take into account that the CPU is an ARM chip, and not Intel x86.
Carl, any chance you’d be willing to take on another platform for your package
distribution? Raspian is a direct Debian implementation, so you should be able to re-use a
lot of your setup.
I’d be willing to donate a configured Pi 2 to the project if that would help.
-David
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