Also, we recently partnered with CG Cookie (https://cgcookie.com/?ref=rentaflop), one of the world's largest communities for learning Blender! The partnership gives you 15% off a CG Cookie membership! Once you create an account with rentaflop, we'll follow up with instructions for getting the discount. If you sign up for the CG Cookie membership, you'll also be eligible for a 15% discount for your renders on rentaflop!
Ah, I understand now. I believe there are enough private GPU owners around to sustain and scale rentaflop for many years to come. For instance, did you know there were around 10 million GPUs mining the Ethereum cryptocurrency at its peak? Our current prices allow our hosts to earn ~10x what crypto mining pays whenever they're processing rendering tasks for rentaflop. There are millions more GPUs owned by gamers, AI hobbyists, businesses, etc. that we hope to leverage to make 3D rendering more accessible to artists. If we manage to attract even a tiny fraction of these, we stand a chance at becoming the fastest and most affordable render farm on the planet.
Great point. We're working on a render pricing estimator that allows you to upload a blend file and get an estimated price back. Until we have this, one way to see the estimated price of your render job is to upload your blend but cut the animation short. For instance, if your animation is 1000 frames, render the first 100 and extrapolate the price by 10x for a rough estimate. Then you can later render the rest by setting the animation in the blend file to only be frames 101-1000.
It's on our long-term roadmap to offer other services such as scientific computing, monte carlo simulation, AI, etc. One issue that arises from Deep Learning tasks such as stable diffusion is that the various devices in the network need to communicate periodically, especially when training models, which presents problems when the devices are scattered across the globe.
It's on our roadmap to expand support to other systems such as Windows.
May I ask why using a thumb drive is a deal breaker? Typically the setup for our software only takes around 15 minutes to complete, and we can have someone from our support team help walk you through it.
We currently limit blend file size to 500MB and ensure our host hardware providers have the necessary bandwidth to handle transfers of this scale. We take measures to secure and bolster data privacy, but advise our users not to upload sensitive or confidential information that they can't allow others to see.
Thanks for pointing this out! Octane benchmark is a rendering industry standard for pricing hardware. It's useful because when someone launches a rendering job, it doesn't just run on one device, say an RTX 3090 or 1660, but rather on a whole host of devices.
Using this benchmark and our pricing of $.0019 per Octane benchmark hour, a 3090 would cost about $1.24/hr. The important thing to remember, and the reason we don't display our pricing like this, is that you aren't buying raw graphics card power from rentaflop or renting a single GPU. Instead, you're paying to have your Blender project rendered by dozens or even hundreds of graphics cards in parallel.
While we take measures to secure and bolster data privacy, it's possible for hosts to be malicious. As a result, you should never run workloads containing sensitive or confidential information on rentaflop. In the future, we may decide to offer a special service that renders your work only on rentaflop-owned hardware.
With that being said, there are plenty of Blender projects that don't have this requirement, and we aim to focus on these types of projects.
Many of our early hardware providers (hosts) are crypto miners, as they often have many graphics cards. As a result, we pay our hosts in crypto in order to attract them to our network. Our software, rentaflop miner, doesn't behave like a normal miner, however. Its goal is to take existing cryptocurrency miners who mine currencies like Ethereum and give their hardware more useful work such as rendering.
Thank you for your question! We believe our pricing is competitive and tends to be one of our strong points, along with our speed. We charge considerably less than most other rendering services. Our farm will also render your projects much faster than a single RTX 3070 can render them.
For artists/studios who do a ton of rendering, it may be worth it for them to buy up many graphics cards and create their own private render farm. However, this requires considerable up-front cost as well as a lot of technical expertise, which many simply don't have. For a lot of them, it's a much better deal to render with rentaflop and not have the headache and cost of managing hardware.
Crowdsourcing for machine learning is certainly possible, and it's one of the things we've thought about a lot. One issue that current Deep Learning algorithms, for instance, have with crowdsourcing is that they require periodic communication between devices to sync neural network weights. This is typically not an issue when devices are physically located in the same place with little network latency but becomes a bottleneck when the devices are scattered across the globe. With that being said, there are a few startups I'm aware of that are doing this sort of thing.
We understand that the crypto payouts aren't for everyone. We started with crypto since many of the hardware owners on our network are crypto miners with multiple graphics cards, but it's on our roadmap to offer payouts in USD in the near future!
Thanks for pointing that out, will keep that in mind in the future!
I didn't make it clear in the post, but our product for hardware providers is available for use right now. Here's the link in case anyone wants to try it out: https://portal.rentaflop.com/blog/hosting
Currently, the only limitation we have on what users can render is that it must be legal. The rendering, for instance, must not incorporate real images of child pornography.
To answer your second question, rentaflop miner is our product for hardware providers (hosts). It has an optionally-enabled feature allowing it to mine cryptocurrency when it's not processing any rendering jobs, but it's primary purpose is to provide rendering to our network.
We've tried sheepit. Love the project, especially as you can do free rendering on it. One of the drawbacks of sheepit is that you must provide your own hardware to render others' projects prior to being permitted to render your own projects. Rentaflop, while it costs money, doesn't have this limitation and is faster while being significantly cheaper (~50% less) than most other cloud render farms.
Many of our early hardware providers (hosts) are crypto miners, as they often have many graphics cards. As a result, we pay our hosts in crypto in order to attract them to our network. We understand your concern about crypto mining, so we've added the option to disable the background crypto miner that runs when there aren't render jobs happening. It's also on our roadmap to offer payments to hosts in USD so that hardware owners who aren't interested in crypto can still participate.
Yes, folks who add their hardware to the rentaflop network get 90% of the money earned through their rendering. Many of our hardware owners are cryptocurrency miners, so they'll make more money by completing rendering tasks with us. Did you know rendering jobs are worth ~10x more than mining Ethereum?