<br><div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">Sandia runs on LOTS of clusters that don't have graphics cards. We NEVER run in data server mode (I personally believe that mode is not useful...ever... (waiting for the flames on that statement... :) )
</blockquote><div><br>It has been a while since I had the opportunity to flame Brian :-) <br><br>That mode is useful if you do not want to move data from one cluster to another. If you are running on around 10 nodes, there is a huge difference in rendering performance between software and hardware accelerated OpenGL. So it makes sense to render on a cluster with hardware support.
<br><br> Also, there is a sweet spot when you have, let's say, 128 nodes data server and 16 nodes hardware accelerated render server where you should get better performance because Mesa is an order of magnitude slower than hardware accelerated rendering. To boot, compositing with 128 nodes degrades performance further. On the other hand, you obviously get a lot of performance improvement if you process data with 128 nodes as opposed to 16.
<br><br>Another use case is when you want to render data from a compute server on a tiled display. The only fast way to do that is to use data server/render server. <br><br><br></div><br></div><br>