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Can anyone please provide some links to free or cheap render farms that support
POV-Ray? I remember there used to be some several years ago. I keep getting a
404 message when I try to access IMP.org.
-Mike
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SharkD wrote:
> Can anyone please provide some links to free or cheap render farms that support
> POV-Ray? I remember there used to be some several years ago.
http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/
Cheap, but not free. (Not even *especially* cheap in the long term, but
for short term it's pretty good.)
--
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
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Darren New <dne### [at] san rrcom> wrote:
> SharkD wrote:
> > Can anyone please provide some links to free or cheap render farms that support
> > POV-Ray? I remember there used to be some several years ago.
>
> http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/
>
> Cheap, but not free. (Not even *especially* cheap in the long term, but
> for short term it's pretty good.)
>
> --
> Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
Interesting. I wonder what the speed would be compared to rendering it on my
machine (AMD Sempron 3000), and what the end cost would be? Also, I'm not sure
I could figure out how to set it up. You would need to select an operating
system, install POV-Ray and so on. One of the Linux options would be most cost
effective, but I've never used Linux before.
I wonder if someone could set up an account and then charge other users (via
Paypal, maybe?) to render scenes?
-Mike
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SharkD wrote:
> Interesting. I wonder what the speed would be compared to rendering it on my
> machine (AMD Sempron 3000), and what the end cost would be?
They claim it's about a 1.7GHz Xenon machine. Of course, they have mondo
machines they're running virtual machines on top of. Experience
indicates that on average this is about right, while in practice there
are small variations over the scale of a minute or two.
> Also, I'm not sure I could figure out how to set it up.
> You would need to select an operating
> system, install POV-Ray and so on. One of the Linux options would be most cost
> effective, but I've never used Linux before.
It's not too difficult. They already have images available. You could
boot up a machine, use rpm or yast or whatever to install POV-Ray, and
run it. If you've done any sort of system admin before, it's pretty
straightforward. You haven't, so it would probably be better to get
someone to set it up for you.
I have no idea how you make a Windows image. I haven't tried that.
> I wonder if someone could set up an account and then charge other users (via
> Paypal, maybe?) to render scenes?
Yes, you can. Indeed, if I understand it, you can set up for-fee machine
images, where the customer pays you some number of cents per hour for
the privilege of using your machine image. And that number can, of
course, be zero.
I have a program that lets you launch off a number of jobs to a number
of servers, intended for use with Amazon's S3 and EC2. I never quite
finished it up. The basics work, but stuff like creating the directory
structures into which you need to organize your jobs and having the
program launch new servers and such never got finished, mainly because I
wrote it before Amazon added a bunch of goodly stuff to their EC2
interfaces that would make that much easier.
I'm happy to offer it to anyone who wants to help out. Maybe someone who
really knows Linux well enough to know where it caches all your
embarrassing secrets could help set up a machine image with POV-ray
already installed and such, appropriate for looking up what bucket
they're supposed to be using and launching the client side of the code.
I can probably do most of it, but knowing how I can give away a disk
image that's not going to have any of my passwords built into .bashrc or
some such is a bit rough. :-)
--
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Yes, you can. Indeed, if I understand it, you can set up for-fee machine
> images, where the customer pays you some number of cents per hour for
> the privilege of using your machine image. And that number can, of
> course, be zero.
Forgive me if I'm way off the mark since, as you noted, I am inexperienced in
network adminning--but couldn't you simply limit the customers to non-admin
accounts, and thereby save your protected files? I guess a dedicated hacker
could get around this, though...
-Mike
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SharkD wrote:
> Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
>> Yes, you can. Indeed, if I understand it, you can set up for-fee machine
>> images, where the customer pays you some number of cents per hour for
>> the privilege of using your machine image. And that number can, of
>> course, be zero.
>
> Forgive me if I'm way off the mark since, as you noted, I am inexperienced in
> network adminning--but couldn't you simply limit the customers to non-admin
> accounts, and thereby save your protected files? I guess a dedicated hacker
> could get around this, though...
I'm sorry - I don't know what you're asking. Unless what you meant to
quote was where I was talking about my passwords.
The easy way to set up an "image" that you can boot on an Amazon EC2
machine is you boot one of their images, log in, make the changes you
want (like install POV-Ray, configure it to run your render farm
software when it boots, etc), then run a program that takes a snapshot
of the machine and sticks it into a bootable file. The problem is that
program winds up needing your secret Amazon passwords in order to store
the file in a place you can boot it. So it's possible your password,
which costs you money to use, winds up in (for example) the "Recent
Documents" area, or the swap sector, or the command history, or
something like that. If you don't know where and when all that magic
gets stored, it's difficult to make sure that the image you created
doesn't have something like that in there.
Not *too* difficult, but I'd need to take a fair amount of time to make
sure it all worked before I'd release it to someone else. :-)
--
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> The easy way to set up an "image" that you can boot on an Amazon EC2
> machine is you boot one of their images, log in, make the changes you
> want (like install POV-Ray, configure it to run your render farm
> software when it boots, etc), then run a program that takes a snapshot
> of the machine and sticks it into a bootable file. The problem is that
> program winds up needing your secret Amazon passwords in order to store
> the file in a place you can boot it. So it's possible your password,
> which costs you money to use, winds up in (for example) the "Recent
> Documents" area, or the swap sector, or the command history, or
> something like that. If you don't know where and when all that magic
> gets stored, it's difficult to make sure that the image you created
> doesn't have something like that in there.
>
> Not *too* difficult, but I'd need to take a fair amount of time to make
> sure it all worked before I'd release it to someone else. :-)
>
> --
> Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
I didn't realize that the image required your Amazon passwords and such. Thanks
for explaining it.
-Mike
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SharkD wrote:
> I didn't realize that the image required your Amazon passwords and such. Thanks
> for explaining it.
Creating the image requires the program creating the image to know the
password of the account that will be storing the image. In theory,
*using* the image doesn't require that. It requires *some* password, of
course, since you get charged for it, but hopefully it's the password of
the person running the image, not the person who created the image.
It's kind of the same problem of distributing an anonymous message as a
Word document - you have to hope that your personal information didn't
get stored in some binary area of the Word document you didn't know about.
--
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
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SharkD wrote:
> Can anyone please provide some links to free or cheap render farms that
> support POV-Ray? I remember there used to be some several years ago. I
> keep getting a 404 message when I try to access IMP.org.
I used to have one (volunteer, similar to IMP). But I don't have time to
maintain it anymore :(
I also lost my hosting service in the past (making the reasons for closing a
longer list: "lost time, motivation, and hosting"), but then it got hosted
on IMP servers.
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Nicolas Alvarez <nic### [at] gmailcom> wrote:
> I used to have one (volunteer, similar to IMP). But I don't have time to
> maintain it anymore :(
>
> I also lost my hosting service in the past (making the reasons for closing a
> longer list: "lost time, motivation, and hosting"), but then it got hosted
> on IMP servers.
Will IMP ever return? Google hasn't deleted the site from its cache yet.
-Mike
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