[Sidefx-houdini-list] stability of mantra on multi core machines?

[John Coldrick]

On Tuesday 29 July 2008 18:47, Antoine Durr wrote:
> A question for all of you rendering on multi-cores: are you in effect
> starting to treat your renderfarm as individual hosts rather than as
> multiple hosts?  I.e. I'm unclear as to the benefit of rendering 1
> frame on n cores vs. running n frames on n cores.  Is it that the
> memory footprint is getting so big that you're consolidating cores to
> bulk up on ram for the given job?  Just curious.  Thanks!

	I'm not entirely sure who's measuring what with these results of multi core 
renders not performing well.  On 8 cores you are getting significantly faster 
than on two, perhaps not 4 times, but pretty close.

	This is mediated by many convoluted factors - IO, network, exactly what sort 
of render you're doing...

	Here we submit renders to the grid and can ask for a preferred number of 
cores, in which case it will use n or less, or we demand a minimum.  If 
you're rendering very fast small renders(like straight ahead particle 
systems) then I'd recommend 1 core per render.  If you're doing relatively 
slow renders, then anywhere from 2 to 8, depending on memory issues.

	Cheers,

	J.C.



-- 
John Coldrick                  www.axyzfx.com        Axyz Animation
416-504-0425                                         477 Richmond St W
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jc at axyzfx.com                                        M5V 3E7
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