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What’s the difference between a supercomputer and a render farm?

The difference between a supercomputer and a render farm

In brief, both of them are a high-performance computer. A render farm is for a specific purpose. The supercomputer needs to be more general purpose.

The render farm is mainly used for real-time rendering. built to render CGI, typical for film and television visual effects. The rendering of images is a highly parallelizable activity, like frames and sometimes tiles can be calculated independently of the others, with the main communication between processors being the upload of the initial source material, such as models and textures, and the download of the finished images.

Supercomputers are specifically designed to address workloads where there is interaction or synchronization necessary between processors. It is playing an important role in the field of computational science, and are used for a wide range of computationally intensive tasks in various fields. For instance, when you divide a large simulation among the many compute nodes in a Supercomputer, changes to data located on one node (temperature, pressure, position, etc) may need to be known on other nodes, so effects can be propagated.

The difference between a supercomputer and a render farm
What’s the difference between a supercomputer and a render farm?

Render farms may have significant storage capacity and performance, but won’t care much about communication performance between compute nodes. The render farm does not need a low latency interconnect like Infiniband and expensive portion of the supercomputer.

Cre: Quora

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