Blacklist Slave by Plugin?

Deadline
1

Would it be possible to blacklist a slave by plugin?

At the moment I have on each node 2 slave instances, I only want to use the second one for eg. AE rendering while the first one is rendering 3Dsmax.
Of course I can exclude the nodes when submitting the job, but I figured it would make sense to be able to control this from 1 location.
I’d like to do the same with other non CPU intensive jobs and would be nice to able to globally switch/enable this.

Same goes for Python jobs, with regular plugins Deadline detects whether or not the plugin is installed on a slave, with Python it doesn’t so it also send python jobs to slaves that do not have it installed.

This happens beyond control when python jobs are generated by a Python submit script.
The original job had the slaves without python blacklisted, but those that are spawned do not inherit the blacklisting.

2

Could you do this with an OnJobSubmitted event script? Check the type of Job, and then add to the blacklist all of the Slaves that you don’t want participating on the Job.

3

I just had a look at the help files regarding this and that would be an option in theory yes
will ask my guy again to have a look at it… wasn’t aware of this option / method.

thanks!

4

Why not assign different pools to each slave to only pickup AE jobs for example.

5

originally i thought to alter this selection depending on the jobs in queue… but maybe i’m making things too complex and it’s easier to keep doing it manually.
I just thought it’d be nice to have an option where I could to select a bunch of slaves, right-mouse click and select “ignore all AE plugin jobs” and when I want them to join again to easily include them again.
I just notice it’s nice to have a 2nd slave instance, but (in my case) it’s not suited for all jobs are some are more intense.
eg. it’s easy to just process a comp of 2 layers in the background while 3dsmax is rendering. But a comp of 10+ layers with a load of effects need a bit more dedicated cpu

The event plugin would be good to capture the generated Python scripts not having any blacklisted slaves.
This wouldn’t help when done via pools as I don’t think these will be included (unless you can assigned a pool to a specific plugin somewhere ?)

6

I think this is something we will have to look at when the folks are back from Siggraph, as I’ll need to have some of those devs weigh in on various aspects of such an idea.