Digital Art Zone

I finally stopped procrastinating and built my “big server.”

Ultimately, this fire-breathing dragon is going to be running a simulated SQL Server 2012 failover cluster as the lab machine that I desperately need for work. But I wasn’t about to let Carrara go without some loving!

I used 2 AMD Opteron 12-core CPUs and loaded up with 64 GB of RAM. Tomorrow I start building this machine’s “little sister” (just one 12-core CPU and 32 GB RAM).

Here’s the Render Room screaming along with (nearly) all the dials turned to 11…

Garstor is happy tonight!

Ya got me drooling

nice to have big bucks

Actually, I cashed in the remainder of my Microsoft shares. Most of that is for my move to Seattle next year, but I do need these machines for work (and I do miss the Microsoft labs) to build a mini-network of virtual machines.

I dropped about $6000 on a system last Christmas from http://www.digitalstormonline.com/  I’ve been more than pleased with the system and the service and actually thought I was rockin Daz Studio and Carrara pretty hard till I seen this!

Virtual Media - 14 July 2012 07:56 PM

I dropped about $6000 on a system last Christmas from http://www.digitalstormonline.com/  I’ve been more than pleased with the system and the service and actually thought I was rockin Daz Studio and Carrara pretty hard till I seen this!

Ah the vagaries of Moore’s Law!

It was just over $6000 for both of my servers - nearly everything bought through New Egg; the hard drives I had to get through Amazon.

For the record, the GI sample living room scene is providing quite the workout.

Garstor—-
            Wow—-sounds like a great machine——-if you could you post the specs ie. ram (company/ type) Mobo etc—-I am sure others might be interested as well. Always wondered about those opterons with all those cores. Its so helpful to have specs of a working machine to copy when making a new rig or buying components.

            And of course—the egg is just awesome.

rich

Hello Garstor!

Nice to have so much buckets but its not nice to have a very big bug:
Why are the shadows of “DAZ3D” incorrect ??? You can see it especially at the last “D”-letter…

Greetings
tezen

3dView - 15 July 2012 04:27 AM

Garstor—-
            Wow—-sounds like a great machine——-if you could you post the specs ie. ram (company/ type) Mobo etc—-I am sure others might be interested as well. Always wondered about those opterons with all those cores. Its so helpful to have specs of a working machine to copy when making a new rig or buying components.

SPECS - msinfo32.exe
OS Name   Microsoft Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise
Version   6.1.7601 Service Pack 1 Build 7601
System Manufacturer ASUSTeK Computer INC.
System Model KGP(M)E-D16
System Type x64-based PC
Processor AMD Opteron(TM) Processor 6238, 2600 Mhz, 6 Core(s), 12 Logical Processor(s)
Processor AMD Opteron(TM) Processor 6238, 2600 Mhz, 6 Core(s), 12 Logical Processor(s)
Total Physical Memory 64.0 GB

PARTS
ASUS KGPE-D16 SSI EEB 3.61 Server Motherboard Dual Socket G34 AMD SR5690 DDR3 1600/1333/1066/800

AMD Opteron 6238 Interlagos 2.6GHz 16MB L3 Cache Socket G34 115W 12-Core Server Processor (x2)

ASUS ENGTX550 Ti/DI/1GD5 GeForce GTX 550 Ti (Fermi) 1GB 192-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16
  * not a bleeding edge video card because the primary purpose of the machine is to run virtual servers - but I did need something beefier than an on-board video card

Western Digitial Caviar Black 1TB SATA-3 hard drives (x5)

Athena Power CA-SWH01B90 Black Steel Pedestal Server Case
  * this was the only case I could find to fit the over-sized motherboard - only caveat here is that it comes with a single fan, so I may need to add more in the future
  * also, I am not sure about blaming the case or the video card, but the when the card is seated in the mobo, it is still too tall to be secured to the case with screws

BE AWARE: I am still investigating this and it is probably AMD’s chip design fault…but I noticed in PerfMon that occasionally the total CPU processing would drop to near zero. It quickly shot back up to over 80% but would eventually repeat this. I suspect that this is caused by the on-chip L1 cache becoming invalid and needing to be flushed. Certainly a major performance if you are doing genetic research into cancer or something…but probably not serious for Carrara - just annoying for an uber-geek.

Honestly; I would have preferred buying Intel but I wanted tons of cores and the price couldn’t be beat. I was feeling better about the purchased when I learned that 3DAGE has used Carrara exclusively on AMD chips.   But for long-term, “real” server-grade work, Intel is probably the way to go.

tezen - 15 July 2012 05:05 AM

Nice to have so much buckets but its not nice to have a very big bug:
Why are the shadows of “DAZ3D” incorrect ??? You can see it especially at the last “D”-letter…

I hear you brah! Fortunately, I didn’t make the scene!

That’s a nice system Garstor! Hopefully it’ll be able to up your Carrara dosage and take the edge off your current environs.

evilproducer - 15 July 2012 06:20 AM

That’s a nice system Garstor! Hopefully it’ll be able to up your Carrara dosage and take the edge off your current environs.

Work??!!? What’s that? SQL-what? SharePoint-huh?  :-D

Oh if I could only win a lottery…

Garstor - 15 July 2012 06:47 AM

evilproducer - 15 July 2012 06:20 AM

That’s a nice system Garstor! Hopefully it’ll be able to up your Carrara dosage and take the edge off your current environs.

Work??!!? What’s that? SQL-what? SharePoint-huh?  :-D

Oh if I could only win a lottery…

AbortThread(LAMENTATION);
SetEvent(BACK_TO_THE_GRIND); 

That must be Windows code. Please don’t port it to my system.

tezen - 15 July 2012 05:05 AM

Hello Garstor!

Nice to have so much buckets but its not nice to have a very big bug:
Why are the shadows of “DAZ3D” incorrect ??? You can see it especially at the last “D”-letter…

Greetings
tezen

I don’t think that’s a bug so much as a consequence of the scene set-up and render settings.

If you take a look, the light through transparency is disabled for the main setting but enabled for the indirect light.
The caustics are also on. We are actually seeing shadows that are too dark rather than missing shadows and this shows on every letter.

This may be a stylistic choice by the scene designer.

I’ve never seen a 24 core render before. Looks like fun.
Why do the tiles only number to 8?

RoguePilot - 15 July 2012 08:06 AM

I’ve never seen a 24 core render before. Looks like fun.
Why do the tiles only number to 8?

That surprised me too. That might be considered a bug in Carrara display of the rendering tiles; however, I am more inclined to point at the MSINFO32 data…the AMD chips are actually 6-cores with Hyper-Threading / Hyper-Transport (or whatever) technology enabled.

I bet that Carrara is actually counting cores via socket-to-logical processor ratios rather than summing up the grand total of all available logical processors.

On that note, I’d love to see Carrara implement an affinity mask feature for CPUs. That way you could “give” X-number of cores to the Carrara process and reserve Y-number of cores for the rest of the system.