My team has been using Backburner for a long time now, and they seem to be having trouble wrapping their heads around the concept of pool priorities vs job priorities. They get confused when they send a job with a high job priority and it does not start to render right away because the pool priorities are overriding it.
I'm not really sure what I am asking, but I guess I need some advice on best practices, to get people into a different headspace about how to manage their jobs on the farm with deadline.
How many different applications are you running on your farm? The reason we have pools (and we are using them) at Frantic is that we have 2D and 3D departments with different needs, running Digital Fusion and 3ds Max on the same network.
If you were running just 3ds Max, you could emulate the way Backburner works by creating one single Pool called “3dsmax” and assigning all machines to it. Your colleagues would have no other choice but to submit to that one pool and the only thing that will control the priorities would be Job Priority value and the submission date (e.g. if two jobs have the same priority, the older one will be picked).
In our case, we have some machines assigned to both the DigitalFusion pool and the 3dsMax pool. When there are Fusion jobs to process, these machines will handle them with higher priority. When there are no fusion jobs, the machines will also pick up jobs from the Max pool to avoid sitting idle.
You can also use Pools to divide your machines completely, like 10 machines for 2D jobs only, and all the others for Max. If you submit jobs as Pool Exclusive, then machines from the first pool will never pick Max jobs. This would be cool for example if Max is not even installed on these machines and you want to avoid getting errors from them…
You can also set up a High Priority pool out of the fastest machines with the most RAM, and set the regular lower priority Max pool as second pool for all your machines. If somebody has a very important job to render, the High Priority machines will pick that job first and process it before looking for regular jobs. If you have an important deadline to meet (pun intended!) while the rest of the colleagues are working on not-so-important tasks, you can get a certain percentage of the farm for you by submitting to the special pool that gives you the cream of the crop of your machines at your disposal. When you are not rendering your special jobs, the good machines will still pick jobs from the regular pool, so the farm would not be idle.
There are many more ways to set up pools, but these are some basic examples…
Does This mean that even though a machine is not a member of the “3dsmax” pool, it will try to render a max job if the artist did not designate the job as “pool exclusive”?
You can also use Pools to
divide your machines
completely, like 10 machines
for 2D jobs only, and all the
others for Max. If you submit
jobs as Pool Exclusive, then
machines from the first pool
will never pick Max jobs. This
would be cool for example if
Max is not even installed on
these machines and you want to
avoid getting errors from
them...
Pool exclusivity (whether or not the job can be rendered by machines outside of the pool)
* A job that has been marked as pool exclusive will only be selected by slaves that have been assigned that pool.
* A job that is not pool exclusive can still be rendered by slaves that have not been assigned that pool, they just have the lowest priority with regards to the Pool property.
Does This mean that even
though a machine is not a
member of the “3dsmax” pool,
it will try to render a max
job if the artist did not
designate the job as “pool
exclusive”?
You can also use Pools to
divide your machines
completely, like 10 machines
for 2D jobs only, and all the
others for Max. If you submit
jobs as Pool Exclusive, then
machines from the first pool
will never pick Max jobs. This
would be cool for example if
Max is not even installed on
these machines and you want to
avoid getting errors from
them...
Yes, we actually have 3 main pools. Max, After Effects, and Maya. then the artists have been making their own pools to designate machines that have certain fonts installed, or for one-off jobs. I am going to go in and re-organize the pools. I think they have created so many pools that they are confusing the whole process.