From: "Abraham Schneider" <aschneider@(email surpressed)>
Subject: Multicore workstations and clever farm use
   Date: Tue, 29 Sep 2009 10:54:03 -0400
Msg# 1898
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Hi there!

With all the 'new' multicore workstations we have now with 4, 8 or 16 cores, I'm thinking about using them in the renderfarm as well. But I can't find a good solution to do this at the moment. Problem is:

I defined all the machines in the hosts file to be a 'cluster' of 4 cores. So a machine with 4 real cores is listed as 1 Cpu in the hosts file, a machine with 8 cores is listed as 2 Cpus. And in Shake I start my jobs with '-cpus 4' to use 4 cores to render on one frame.

That way of working is fine when I don't use the workstation at all and want to use it completely in the farm. But for machines with 8 or more cores there would be another nice scenario:

Sometimes it would be really nice to use 4 of the cores to work in the GUI and the other 4 cores to render in with rush.

Is there any clever way to handle this in rush? At the moment the only way I see is to edit the hosts file and change the 'cpus' value. But I have to do this every time an operator wants to change from 'all cores to the farm' to 'only some cores to the farm' and back.

Really perfect would be an advanced 'onrush' where I have more than two options: not online, partially online, fully online. Or something similar.

How do you all handle this?

Thanks, Abraham

--
Abraham Schneider
Senior VFX Compositor, 2 D Artist
ARRI Film & TV Services GmbH   Tuerkenstr. 89   D-80799 Muenchen / Germany
Phone (Tel# suppressed) EMail aschneider@(email surpressed)
www.arri.de/filmtv
ARRI Film & TV Services GmbH
Sitz: München  -  Registergericht: Amtsgericht München  -  Handelsregisternummer: HRB 69396
Geschäftsführer: Franz Kraus; Dr. Martin Prillmann; Thomas Till

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