A few weeks ago i did set up a network render system in Amazon’s cloud computing facility EC2. After doing so i, of course, also wanted to test it. For that i took an old project of mine and created a rendering of it with Luxrender. It took quite a while to render, and with my MacBook only it would have taken a few days. So this was an excellent test scenario for the EC2 Luxrender cloud rendering. So here’s the image:
To say it short: it was working like a charm, and it took only a few hours to get that picture. And i’m sure, if i would have known about Luxrender what i now know about it, it would hvae been even faster.
All in all i rendered about 15 hours on EC2, counting the creation previews and the final render. I didn’t want to overdo it, so i was pretty hesitant about doing much more. The costs were bothering me, and a month later i can say: it wasn’t necessary. Amazon billed me 6,80€ for that 15 hours, which is about as low as i best hoped it would be.
Using it this way EC2 can really cut the basic costs off of rendering, no need for a new computer here. The next thing i’m going to do is to test the supercomputing clusters Amazon has on Americas east coast only. Thanks to the global character of the net they are available too, i’m really interested in what’s going to happen when using them.
