Hi everyone,
Since the installation of our RANCH Runner, we have worked hard to reach a goal: to become
the most affordable high performance rendering service on the market. Well, today is the day!
We will let you judge if we have succeeded. As we want to be completely transparent about it, here are all the details:
1) our
base price (Sapphire formula) is now
2.9 cents ($) per GHz-Hour (~ 2.0 euro-cents per GHz-H). We have 4 levels of priority (Sapphire, Emerald, Ruby and Diamond), the most expensive being 6.2 euro-cents per GHz-H, which is still very affordable. The priorities are there to sort the projects in the waiting list, if you are in a hurry you can raise your priority to climb to the top. And as we also have discounts for quantities, the actual price could be even less than that (up to 70% discount!).
2) for the technically inclined: your project is rendered on our RANCH Runner, a modular multinode system driven by proprietary - and highly optimized - management software. It is currently configured with
128 Intel Xeon X5650 CPUs (6-core) for a total of 768 cores and 1536 render threads, organized in 64 dual nodes with
24 GB RAM each. There is no time shared on the RANCH, so each projet is guaranteed to benefit from the full power of the system when it is processed: you get the same level of performance, everytime.
3) As a concrete example, a project which takes around one week to render on a Core i7 PC is rendered in approximately one hour, for $60 (~ 42 €) with the Sapphire priority. Depending on the discount you get, this hour could cost as low as $18 (~12/13 €).
We hope that this will bring new possibilities to a lot of 3D artists and companies who previously couldn't afford to use a rendering service!
Cheers,
Fred
RANCH Computing Metasite
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Parsing project names and files coming from so many different users and scenes and software packages, in a completely automated system, is very complex. Between superlong filenames which can cause command line problems, non-international characters you can find in french, spanish, german, etc. extra dots, spaces, commas... On the software we develop we manage to catch most of the problems, but in the whole pipeline many programs must communicate, and each one deals with this differently. So, to be on the safe side, it is always best to go with [a..A] [z..Z] [0..9] and '_' characters in filenames and avoid the others. That being said, in the next version of RANCHecker I will probably force the renaming of the scene to replace spaces with underscores.