What is Render Farm?

Render farm is a more popular name; actually we should call it “Distributed & Parallel Computing Cluster”, which is consisted of CPU, Ethernet and OS. It helps the computing power of commercial computer get close to the computing power of supercomputers.

Then what does “Cluster” exactly mean? Cluster is the computer cluster which is a group of computers connecting by communication protocols. It can move work load from an overloaded computer to others of cluster. This feature is called “Load Balancing”, which aims at composing grid computing capabilities by mainstream hardware and achieving or even surpassing the performance of supercomputers. The typical supercomputer manufacturers include IBM, SGI, as well as some other universities and research organizations. Take IBM Sequoia supercomputer for example, it has 1,572,864 CPUs and more than 1.6 TB RAM, which is used for following old nuclear weapons in American mountain area and simulating nuclear explosions. The data amount that Sequoia calculates has to be calculated more than 320 years by computers around the world. The cost of such supercomputer is hardly affordable to mostly business users. Besides, there are many problems to be solved, like technical and maintenance issues, high cost of updating but poor upgrade, etc. Therefore, the grid computing system, which is composed by using communication technology to connect computers, is capable of assigning load to other computers so that to simulate the capacity of supercomputers. Nowadays, lots of supercomputer systems are composed by cluster technology; especially in recent years, most of the world’s Top 500 supercomputers are using cluster system.

One of Fox Renderfarm’s server rooms, National Super Computer Center in Hunan, China, which is ranking 28^th among Top 500 super computers, also applies cluster system. By applying cluster system, Fox Renderfarm is able to connect 2,000 servers together and offer fast render service to our clients. For more details about our hardware specs and software, please visit our official website.

What is Render Farm?