I need some serius help !! I have two servers, how can i use both of them to run a single installment of 3dstudio max and other applications while SHARING there processing power? I think its called cluster processing.

Clustering probably won't help you overly much in the real-time modes of 3dsmax, as the latency of the interconnects between nodes is too high. For multi-node renders, however, you can do quite well. MAX actually includes a system for network rendering; it differs between versions, but in MAX5, there was an additional shortcut in the 3D studio start menu entry to start the network rendering client (note that you don't need to authorize systems that are only used as network rendering nodes). Once you have your nodes started, you can select the network rendering options in the render dialog. There are similar systems for some of the 3rd party renderers (brazil r/s, vray) that may be slightly different to use.

 

For other software that doesn't include its own distributed computing system, there are versions of Linux that can support clustering. The easiest would be cluster knoppix, however it requires PXE network cards (special stuff to have the machine boot from a boot image on the network), which not everyone has.

Thanks alot, I have some money saved up, i think am going to go with the dual xeon broard that supports SLi by iWILL that way i can use two 6800s and 2gig ram. that should give me what i need for game development, modeling and game play. I can also build a storage server to accommodate the data. Linux is a good idea, but what support can linux give a windows user doing modeling? I dont know much about linux :)

 

Again thanks.

While I haven't tried it, this page seems to cover how to get a Linux system up and running for 3D: http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-mini/3D-Modelling.html#ss3.2

 

I've never used this 'The Mops' modeller that they have, but I'm guessing it's not quite as 'there' as MAX, Maya, or C4D.

 

Back when I was doing big 3D projects 3 years ago, our lab was 10 or so P4 2.somethings with 512MB of memory. We put nice video cards on a couple machines as modelling stations, then used everything as render nodes for big/final jobs, typically pointing them all to a single node's windows network share to drop off frames. We didn't really use the network renderer, because XP would have a tendancy to interrupt week-long renders with silly things like "There are icons on your desktop!" and such, so simply dumping what frames we could churn out between crashes and then compositing it all to the final AVI in premeire worked much better. Obviously on a 2K lab, you don't have the OS taking you down as often (it's amazing how poorly a machine responds to displaying a notification bubble when an app is pulling 3GB of virtual memory). I suppose an XP lab could also succeed if you managed to configure it right (and it didn't forget the configuration midway through). Right, so that's my beef with XP as an OS for MAX rendering nodes. YMMV