Hi Robert,
I did consider this method of giving my Designers access to very high spec PCs to render designs as quickly as possible. You could have maybe 3-4 machines supporting 20+ Designers. It’s still something I’d like to play with and I’ve rolled it out in a basic way at one branch where I have a decent spec i7 system supporting a 55″ 4K TV for the client presentation – it works pretty well but I’d like to get an i9 in there.
I understand where Mike Cook is coming from though as it would be nice to be able to ‘hop on’ any PC and run 2020 without the hassle of installing the package with catalogues etc.
For the future, I think that applications will ALL move to a ‘docker’ environment where the app remains completely independent of the hardware running it. Docker apps run a lot more quickly than virtualised apps as they don’t have to ‘simulate’ aspects of the host hardware.
Imagine a time in the near future where almost every system you come across supports docker along with USB3.1 or Thunderbolt. You could walk in with a single USB 3.1 Flash drive (assuming software licensing for 2020 Design), plug it in and off you go at super fast speed.
It’s interesting that Redway who make the rendering module for the 2020 Design package were (at one point anyway) looking at a distributed rendering environment where an application could steal processor cycles from other hardware. I’m not sure if this would be restricted to local hardware or cloud and I’d have some concerns as to whether this could actually slow things down given the extreme speed of modern GPUs
Ideally, the 2020 render engine should be set up to take advantage of a setup equivalent to bitcoin mining rigs which use machines with (for example) 10 top end NVidia cards to superspeed calculating operations. In this way, you could have 1 machine set up like this and as soon as a designer needs a very high res render, 2020 Design would throw the render requirements at the rendering server and get the finished render back in just a few seconds. If the render is still too slow then add a few more NVidia cards!!
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