The Molecule’s Render Farm

Every VFX studio needs a render farm, but the specs are typically considered a bit of a secret.  Not so at The Molecule, who has just posted a nice article on their blog detailing both the hardware and software configuration they use.

Over the last 6 months our render farm has gone through a full body remodeling. Over 100 processors are logged into the system at once. The new server, written in php, features a virtual file system that links together functions and resources into a read-write space that connects the interface to the back-end components, offering a pretty cool thin client set-up. Some other interesting and different features are the render farm’s graphical interface, written in Flash AS3 and containing 21,000 lines of code, and its node-based design allowing for the creation of dependency trees (a means by which processes can be organized).

via Everything looks better after The Molecule.

This story written by Randall Hand

Randall Hand is a computer graphics programmer and news junky that's been working in the field for the last 15 years. He's responsible for visualizations generated on some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, ytnef, mullion support in ParaView, and VizWorld.com.