by ROUBAL » Fri Mar 22, 2013 2:52 am
ROUBAL
Fri Mar 22, 2013 2:52 am
Maybe I have missed something, and probably I am going to say something stupid, but I have done some fast calculus and I don't understand the interest of Cloud computing from the distant client point of view :
I explain : I have just tested my internet upload speed, and I get 0.83 Mb per second, which is rather good compared to most users in my area. I must say that it is 4:00 in the night, and that the speed can be much lower at some hours. Added to that, the measured bitrate is the real bitrate, including the control data. So, the bitrate of useful data is actually slower (maybe 20% slower).
My current scene with every required files (ocs, ocm, obj, mtl, textures, scatter files) represents around 1.7 GB = 1700 MB = 13600 Mb. So, in best conditions, I would load my scene on the cloud in 4,55 hours instead of 4 minutes on my machine.
I rarely render more than 4 hours on one image on just two GTX 580.
What is the interest of rendering an image in few seconds on 128 distant GPUs when you have to upload during more than 4 hours ?
Maybe just to save some hours on very large resolutions ?
Uploading during 4 hours also means that the internet connection is busy for 4 hours. So if you have something else important to do in the mean time, you are stuck or in best case you have to share the badwidth with the main loading and increase the transfer time for both tasks...
If you consider that so long transfer can also be aborted at random by unexpected service interruptions (not rare here)...
The power of 128 GPUs is very interesting for an animation if you have them at home, but if each frame requires 4 hours (I don't count texture which could be loaded only one time. They represent only 300 MB on my 1.7GB current scene) of loading through internet, what is the advantage ? I really don't understand who is supposed to need this kind of service.
Is the cloud reserved to softwares with an integrated plugin ?
I perfectly understand the interest of usual render farms (for Blender for example), because the animation is provided in the project file (Blender file) itself and each frame is processed from the provided project file, so the project file is loaded only one time on the render farm.
Animation is already currently a problem for Blender users because of export time for each frame, if added to that there is a transfer time to the cloud of 4.5 hours per frame ... So, animation seems still out of question, even on the cloud. Right ? At least for Blender users ?
French Blender user - CPU : intel Quad QX9650 at 3GHz - 8GB of RAM - Windows 7 Pro 64 bits. Display GPU : GeForce GTX 480 (2 Samsung 2443BW-1920x1600 monitors). External GPUs : two EVGA GTX 580 3GB in a Cubix GPU-Xpander Pro 2. NVidia Driver : 368.22.