A render farm created with eight Raspberry Pis!!
Jamesy writes:
Really stoked about this! Carl C. has written an article about his Raspberry Pi Render farm. The article is up on Crowdrender, and is a short read, about 3 mins. If you’re interested in hardware that uses arm based chips on Linux, highly recommend you check it out!
Link
That sounds fun like a fun project!
Beyond its undeniable instructive nature, how does it compare to price-equivalent solutions from a performance perspective?
Not sure about that, but its a good question. Carl wrote in the article the total cost for all the parts. So you’ll have the numbers for the system to compare. Performance wise, well he’s also quoted the render times for some popular benchmarks so you could take that data and then compare against Blender’s open data project, should give you a good idea of whether this is worth the while from a performance vs cost perspective.
Given the render times on the page, the 8-Pi setup is slightly outperformed by an AMD Ryzen 5 running exclusively on the CPU. Looks like it could be worthwhile if the costs came down on the Pis, but maybe better to use a full system with a discrete GPU if “render power per dollar” is the primary concern.
Thanks man! Good to know that. One thing we’ve not yet looked at is power consumption too. Would be good to know the power demands of the whole Pi setup vs the PC.
We’ve got a Ryzen based system here, 3950X, pulls about 90W idle and 200+ during rendering on the CPU. Hybrid rendering with a GPU is a bit more than that, ok, a lot more than that, 300-400W xD
Thank you, to both of you.
I had seen the data, I just could not make sense of it.
Sorry for the delay on seeing and responding to this! I’d first like to thank James for his work on dealing with my project. Without his interest my project would never have been completed. James, you truly are dedicated to getting network rendering in blender available for everyone. With that I would like to switch gears and say that the cost of this project is not the intent I was looking to focus on. Yes there are better things to spend your money on. James and his team have worked hard to get remote rendering working well and, to my knowledge, very cost effective. This was a project just to offload my primary pc’s render task without depending on a cloud service or retiring a comparable pc to do the task. After reviewing the comments I would like to add that the Pi’s are running PoE and use only the provided power from the switch to do all the work. That might not be enough for some but I thought it was interesting after completing the project since my primary machine uses a considerable amount more.
One thought I had on this is scaleability. If the power consumption is far less and you had a few pis kicking around then you already have something to start with. being able to offload the rendering project from the PC that the model or scene is built in, allowing it to do something else in the interim is still useful even if the render process would be relatively slow. Adding an extra Pi or similar cheap small form factor computer every now and then would boost processing power incrementally without being harmful on the wallet. If the network rendering host can work with multiple computers of any type then there are also other options such as the repurposing of an x64 PC, or even, and this could be a VERY interesting area to look into, repurposing mobile phones. Given the speed and graphics power of modern mobile phones, being able to unlock the phone and flash a custom operating system onto it, making it into part of the farm. might be a really interesting prospect.