I know that previously people have posted about distributed Houdini sims through Deadline and it’s not a feature that’s currently properly supported. I wondered if this was something that was being looked at in the near future at all?
If not then we will continue to use HQueue as it’s much easier to manage for simulations. With this in mind though I have an additional question regarding the way slave scheduling and power management work. In order to use HQueue properly we have to disable the slaves that we want to sim on. This inevitably means that we have wasted time on the slave when the simulation stops before we then re-enable it. We would prefer to be able to prevent the slave starting if a specific process is running (in this case hython.exe). There is the option to do this in slave scheduling but this has no effect on the power management so the slave keeps starting up. Is there a way we can achieve this? Or is this something that’s just not supported?
HQueue is actually something we have supported since the Deadline 7 era of the software, as we have explained in our Houdini documentation docs.thinkboxsoftware.com/produc … udini.html
So we’ve done some experimentation but we’re not getting very far. We’ve started out with a non-distributed simulation to at least get the ball rolling. Unfortunately we’re getting an error because the simulation isn’t distributed and the hrender_dl.py script is looking for the control node attribute on the hqueue simulation rop. It’s blank because we’ve got partitioning type set to none… I’ve attached the log file so you can see the error.
Thanks for the response. We don’t tend to do distributed sims most of the time because we don’t need to, only the larger water sims tend to need it and it’s a bit of a pain to setup. But being able to put everything through Deadline would obviously be much better for us! I’ve attached a basic file with a simulation in for you to test with.
Do you have any information on when this might be implemented please? We’d really like to get away from using HQueue if we can and get it all running through Deadline.
The 8.1 release is slated for early January 2017 at this point. The beta has had it available for awhile, and it’s quite solid at this point. We just have a policy of not releasing in December since we’re always at a lower capacity with people on holidays.