Hey!
I was thinking of using amazon ec2 once in a while to speed up my animations... Will I run into problems if I keep killing and doing new instances while still saying under 5 render nodes? What I mean is that if I run 5 nodes today, kill them all and then reinstall the nodes does the license get "full"?
-NRJ
As long as you're not using more than your 5 render nodes *simultaneously* you should be fine. I don't know that EC2 will be a cost-competitive option for rendering, but it's an interesting possibility.
- Oshyan
Did some testing and you were right. However it's tight.
I did the test with one small animation I'm currently rendering... Done with ranch computing it would be 18€ as per their calculator (sapphire formula)
and on amazon high CPU node (spot price) the same thing would be 17.50€ with current USD vs EUR rates... However on amazon one only gets 7GB of ram and the price can fluctuate and you have to manage the computers yourself... So there's about 3% difference. Plus Ranch would do that small animation in 8 minutes (if no queue) and using 5 amazon EC2 nodes it would take about 10 hours.
However amazon has these cluster compute instances which seem to have about 3 times the power of one high cpu node.. They're linux only at the moment but the prices are comparable to high cpu nodes.. Could be something to look for in the future!
-NRJ
Interesting results, thanks for the details!
- Oshyan