Hello,

I have looked for an answer to this question in this forum and couldn't find one, so I apologize in advance if it has been answered already:

What is the maximum number of cores per system that Houdini/Mantra can use to render? I ask because there is a quad socket mobo that can take in 4x12 core AMD CPUs. OS will be Windows 7. Thanks to all for your support. -JV

AFAIK there's no limit, if the OS supports it, mantra will use it. However, might be worth waiting for someone behind the code to verify. I'm sure there's a practical limit to how many they've *tested*.

Cheers,

J.C.

Thanks J.C. We are about to take a rather large contract for our facility size with a very tight budget. After evaluating HD Apprentice we see no better alternative than Houdini to tackle the massive amount of work we have ahead. We haven't tried the EC2 Cloud yet, but the pricing seems very reasonable. Having said that we are still going to need a render farm for compositing and our other apps, so it would be real nice to know if we can put 5 to 10 of these 48 core machines and be able to use every last core on them for render. I'll wait to see if someone at Side FX can answer this. Thanks again -JV

jvelez1
We haven't tried the EC2 Cloud yet, but the pricing seems very reasonable.

I recommend to think twice, before jumping into EC2 Cloud. After some experience I see it more as a solution for student films or personal projects, not for a commercial projects with tight deadlines and precise scheduled client dailies.

Getting to a worth using machines on a cloud on time you actually need it, is a challenge by itself. Sending data to a cloud for any non trivial scene, is another. Resolve any f*ckup happening after that, the third one, as responsiveness is not the strongest side of clouds.

This has nothing to do with SESI's implementation of EC2, but the current state of cloud computing itself.

Testing the cloud on a production scenes and counting *all* the time it needs (also from you, as operating cloud takes a lot more time than local farm) to deliver frames on your disks, shows that its actual performance can be lower than a significantly smaller render farm kept on site. Well, at least in my case.

Having said that we are still going to need a render farm for compositing and our other apps, so it would be real nice to know if we can put 5 to 10 of these 48 core machines and be able to use every last core on them for render

.

10x48 cores = 60 standard 8 core machines. Quite a power to fill in Mantra hunger after all.

If you are doing this DIY I would very much recommend building one box first and comparing it to a dual xeon box. These days xeons are pretty fast compared to amd parts for many things. Also things don't usually scale that well beyond 8 cores as the cores need to be fed too and you will find bottlenecks in memory bandwidth. But all of that is very dependent on what you are rendering, ie lots of textures, raytracing blah blah. If you are buying the boxes ready built ask for a demo unit and do a bit of testing before putting all eggs into one basket.
Best of luck,
Fabian

jvelez1
What is the maximum number of cores per system that Houdini/Mantra can use to render? I ask because there is a quad socket mobo that can take in 4x12 core AMD CPUs. OS will be Windows 7. Thanks to all for your support. -JV

IIRC, windows has a problem with systems beyond 64 cores. So you should be safe with 48 cores per system. Also keep in mind that your memory is huge enough and properly attached. I'd recommend 8GB RAM at least per socket as “entry level”.

But as other said too get a test box first to see if it fits your needs!