Hi Ryan, i’m trying to figure out a way to launch a job that would run only once on each machine. I want to create test scenes and run them on a all machine or a list of machines to check if the machine renders correctly, i.e if the machine is setup correctly.
Do you think there is a way to do this?
Something like this has been on our todo list for a while, but we never getting around to even investigating the possibility. An idea we have would to have a flag for the job, and once a slave renders a task for this job, it blacklists the job so that it doesn’t pick it up again. Of course this would mean that each machine would still render a different frame, but that should be OK if each frame is the same (and it would make running comparisons easy because each slave would write out a different file). It would be up to the person submitting the job to ensure that there are at least as many tasks for the job as there are slaves in the farm.
In the meantime, one option could be to submit a job with one frame to every machine in the farm (using the WhiteList= option in the job info file). You could use deadlinecommand.exe -slaves to get the list of slaves, which should help the automation process.
Cheers,
This kind of feature would be most useful for deploying software or a patch which needs to be installed on all machines at some point (when the slave is idle).
This would be a very nice feature!
Mike
One workaround I found is to create a .bat file containing the render command and execute it using the execute command in the right click menu of the salve and setting the command to the .bat file. But this is not optimal and can’t let me test with the mayabatch plugin.