There was a discussion a while back about perhaps having a gcc compile farm with Linode machines, but it was decided that it would be a bad idea as the machines couldn't necessarily be trusted, which is obviously very important when it comes to executable code.

My question is, what would people think of a povray render farm, perhaps set up with the pvmpov patch or similar? It would be pretty cool, in my opinion.

There are two things that I'd say though. Firstly, remember that these are vritual dedicated servers, so it would make sense that only one VDS on each host should become part of the farm, as there'd be no gain otherwise.

Secondly, it would probably be best to stick with boxes in the same datacenter, as bandwidth isn't charged for within the same datacenter. Not only that, but it'd be at its fastest, too.

What do people think?

IMO, a node of a render farm, no matter what it's supposed to render, should be a dedicated machine of its own, not part of a virtual dedicated server.

A render farm can and will use a lot of CPU, which is just less than useful on a VPS (Linode), taking the CPU allocation into consideration. It will also most likely make the rest of the Linodes on the same server run a "teeny-tiny bit" slower than optimal.

I've noticed my own Linode respond quite a bit slower when the host I'm on has a higher load average than normal (that has happened a couple of times), and that's not something I as a Linode customer would want as an experience on a daily basis.

Ciaran,

As long as caker doesn't think it's going to cause anyone else problems count me in.

I'm on host9.


What are you thinking of rendering BTW?