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).
