Distributed Sims

Deadline
1

Hello,

I’m really new to deadline and am trying to setup houdini distributed sims on our farm.

First off has anyone successfully done this??

Second, how exactly do I send specific scripts to a slave to be ran??
If I modify the submission plugin to accept a shell script does that get sent to the repository and then ran on the slaves?
Or even more simplistic. How can I query through deadline, what machines are available, and then just send a command to do something to that slave?

Sorry for the dumb questions just still wrapping my head around things.

Thank you so much.

2

We’re not aware of anyone that has simulated Houdini sims through Deadline. I gave this a quick read over, and it sounds like a typical DR setup, which is a process that isn’t fully supported by Deadline:
sidefx.com/index.php?option= … Itemid=216

What you would probably need to do is manually get the process tracker running on a set of machines that aren’t running the Deadline slave. This would end up being a dedicated sim group of machines. Then you would probably submit a command script job to Deadline that simply launches the “invoke” script. Each line of the command file would represent a slice. Here is the relevant documentation for the command script plugin:
thinkboxsoftware.com/deadlin … andscript/

Note that Vray DR for 3dsmax would work the same way, in that Deadline wouldn’t handle the starting and stopping the DR process on each machine. They have to already be running. Deadline simply offloads the “master” part from your workstation.

Cheers,

  • Ryan
3

Thanks for the quick response.
That makes sense.
I can just host the tracker on the user machine, and let deadline just submit the invoke to the dedicated sim boxes.

Works for me.

Thanks again for your help.