On 06/08/12 14:03, Marco Recuay wrote:
We're starting experiments with moving some rendering workload to
Amazon's EC2 cloud computing platform.
Has anyone here had any experience with this type of pipeline before?
Would Rush pull licenses via a VPN connection to the offsite render
nodes?
Yes -- that, or PPPoE, or similar would be the way to do it.
This way you can not only serve licenses, but manage the remote farm
from your office network (via irush/www-rush/rush command line)
while keeping both networks private from the internet, yet able
to see each other.
Folks do run Rush over WANs using either private connectivity
or the internet to interconnect them, and often configure tunnels
over the internet, so their data isn't in the clear on public
wires. (PPPoE, VPN, etc all provide for this)
I know storage is usually the biggest issue with remote rendering,
ie. the file server. This may have changed since the info I last
received.
So far folks have reported that the file servers Amazon provides
can't handle the load of film/video production (ie. maya pulling
large scenes from an EC2 file server, or a comp pulling plates),
so they have to resort to localizing the data, which complicates
the pipeline.
One route to go is to localize the data to each node,
as I don't think Amazon allows you to colo your own file server
at their site.
I think folks have done experiments with Amazon's network,
but have mixed results depending on data size.
There's a good thread here on this subject:
http://studiosysadmins.com/board/viewpost/11158/
Also: here are some articles on "cloud rendering" in the media,
though I'd take much of it with a grain of salt, and I'd
defer to actual results:
http://www.awn.com/articles/article/elastic-cloud-computing-dreamworks-cerelink
http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2011/02/28/hollywoods-render-farms-move-to-the-cloud/