Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
> I used to have one (volunteer, similar to IMP). But I don't have time to
> maintain it anymore :(

And as for my own farm... Started it about two years ago. At first it didn't
work too well, considering it was a Linux virtual machine, running on top
of Windows, on my home computer without really enough RAM.

And my Internet connection had 256kbps download and 128kbps upload speed. I
remember one time my connection completely saturated during the whole
night, because of the rendered images being uploaded back :/

Later, somebody offered me hosting on something that was still a home
computer, but had Linux installed for real (not a VM), and a much faster
network connection. Everything got faster.

The farm was ("is") based on BOINC (see http://boinc.org). From
administrating that server, I got a lot of Linux experience. And enough
knowledge about BOINC that now I give tech support to other project admins
(I should start charging for the service as soon as I become 18!).

The BOINC-POVray bridge is code I'm not exactly proud of. It has many things
that feel like a hack. For example, I renamed main() to povmain(), and call
it from my real main() after extracting the input files and other stuff. I
disable file output and hook on a macro (intended for the preview window!)
to get the rendered pixels, and save the image using my own code when the
render is finished. The image is also saved every few minutes in an
uncompressed format with a simple header, to be able to resume the render.
To resume the render, I change the POV-Ray Start_Row setting (!). Uglyyy

I myself question the legality of my code changes. They may not comply with
the POV-Ray source code and redistribution license. Although I might be
covered by clause 2.3, which permits modifications that allow controlling
POV-Ray from other software "for parallel or network rendering purposes".

Some months later, I lost the "hosting". Due to financial problems, this
friend who was hosting me had to shut down many computers and downgrade his
Internet connection speed.

I copied everything back into my computer and loaded it on the VM again.
Back to slowness. But by then I was also losing interest. I was getting
some really strange rendering problems on some scenes, that I never figured
out (they only happened on the farm, not on a standard POV-Ray). I had lots
of users, yet not too much to render (!); I posted about the farm a few
times on POV newsgroups but nobody seemed interested in giving me something
to render.

Plus, keeping the virtual machine running was an annoyance, because of its
RAM usage.

Plus, after having used the BOINC server for so many months, I was already
getting into the stage of "this code sucks so much that most of it would
need a rewrite" :P

So I just let it disappear.

Quite a bit later, I was given access to IMP server, and I decided to
install the BOINC server from scratch. I copied my POV application and the
work generator in there, and even ran a few renders there.

At first I felt like there was still nobody interested in giving me
something to render on it. But when somebody did, I remembered how much of
a mess it was to get a render running (manual processes I never automated
enough). Or I found even worse rendering glitches.

And well... it ran for a while. Actually it's still running
(http://impfarm.imp.org/boinc/), but completely ignored; there hasn't been
a render task in 250 days.

Now I have a job, and my nose in three or four different open source
projects (most BOINC related, go figure). And school, which seem to never
end (similar to hell, huh). I don't think I have the time to keep a
renderfarm up and running...

(I still have the database backups though. I could get it and its hundreds
of users back up if I wanted to, and had the time and motivation)

Post a reply to this message