Is there a way to assign priorities to pools in Deadline? In my setup, I have one pool for our fastest machines, the dedicated render slaves, and a second pool for multi-purpose machines that join the render farm when idle, and I would like to give the dedicated render slave pool priority so that any submitted render job will go to that pool first, then to the multi-purpose pool if no dedicated machines are available. Is that possible? We’re on Deadline 4.1.
Eric
Sure, just create an order of pools and assign them to all the machines such as:
pool1=fast machines
pool2=slow machines
then assign the pools to all the slaves as:
slave1 = pool1, pool2, pool3, etc…
If I understand correctly, I think the functionality that Eric is looking for is slightly different. However, since jobs can only belong to one pool, I don’t think what you’re looking for is possible.
That being said, why not have all the machines in the same pool? The faster machines will naturally pick up more tasks because they finish them faster.
Cheers,
Thanks for the responses, Ryan and Mike. I use the pools the differentiate between our dedicated render slaves and our mixed-use machines. I had hoped to give the dedicated machines priority, since I wanted the fastest machines to pick up jobs first for efficiency sake. Can I put this in as a feature request for a future version?
Cheers,
Eric
Hey Eric,
The main issue with prioritizing pools in this manner is Deadline’s decentralized architecture. The slaves operate independently of each other, so if a “mixed-use” machine tries to find a job, it doesn’t know if the dedicated machines are all busy or not. Even if we were to implement this, there would be cases where this type of priority system wouldn’t always work.
For example, the busy machines could all just be finishing up a 10 hour frame, and there is a single frame left in the job. A mixed-use machine would get this last frame regardless of the priority, because all the dedicated machines are currently busy. I guess the one situation where it would be useful would be when the farm is idle, but again, because the slaves work independently, this priority system wouldn’t work.
In the grand scheme of things, having a single pool in this case for dedicated and mixed-use machines should work just as well, because faster machines will naturally process more tasks than slower machines.
Cheers,