With the extensive use of high-quality (and time consuming) 3D rendering work at the school, we now have developed a small distributed rendering cluster known as a render farm.

The Render Farm consists of five blade servers — each 8-core 3 GHz machines with 8GB of RAM — that are dedicated to running commercial network-aware rendering packages:

• Maxwell Render (Mac/Win)

• Microstation Luxology (Win)

• Mental Ray Batch for Maya (Mac/Win)

• Mental Ray Satellite for Maya (Mac/Win)

The above engines are available to any computer in the school (or university) which has the appropriate software (those above) installed. This includes student-owned laptop computers.

Jobs are submitted by the appropriate software from files located on School of Architecture network drives (eg. Classes, Projects, Scantemp).

With the Render Farm, time-consuming rendering jobs can be offloaded from laptops and public workstations so as to free those machines for other work or other users. Once a job is submitted to the network, the local computer is free to work on other things, or the user can log-out and make the machine available for another user. This should reduce the "Rendering - please do not disturb" signs scattered throughout the labs and studios, as well as enable a higher overall performance from student-owned laptop computers.