AWS Thinkbox Discussion Forums

Multiple Groups per job?

In Tractor, multiple Service Keys could be applied to a a job. A common example we had were projects where all our farm machines had Nuke installed, and therefore had the “nuke_render” service key. However, we only had 20 licenses of a certain plugin, purchased from before a floating license model was offered. So only 20 specific machines could render using that plugin (specified by the service key “nuke_sapphire”). We also had 30 (same situation) of a different plugin (with some overlap with “nuke_sapphire”, called “nuke_monsters”). All nuke_sapphire blades were nuke_monsters, but not all nuke_monsters were nuke_sapphires.

You assign a list of keys to each job and Tractor would only assign blades (slaves) that matched all service keys. Being specific allowed us to really utilize our farm and plugins to their fullest.

In Deadline, it doesn’t seem that you can apply more than one Group to a job. Is that the case or am I missing something? Is there a way to duplicate the above behavior in Deadline?

Essentially, your after “Limits” in Deadline: Machine Limits, Plugin Limits, (normal) Limits (for licensing, etc):
docs.thinkboxsoftware.com/produ … imits.html

Here’s a good blog post that covers them well as an introduction:
deadline.thinkboxsoftware.com/fe … -resources

And to answer your last questions. Correct, a job in Deadline can only be applied 1 x pool and/or 1 x group. However, each “Slave” in Deadline could be assigned multiple pools (each Slave could have pool allocations in different orders of priority), whilst “groups” are similar to “pools”, but have no concept of “order of preference” which pools have. Soooo…“pools” (optional) on a Slave are good for controlling the order of workflow that a Slave works on, such as pools called: “2d”, “3d”, “otherStuff”, would mean this particular Slave will try and render “2d” jobs, before then trying “3d”. (Feel free to swap the random string example names for other things such as “maya”, “nuke”, “quicktime”). Finally, “groups” (optional) can be useful to divide up Slaves by “spec” such as group names called: “16gb_ram_machines” or “OSX”, “Win” machines.

Another blog post for fun: deadline.thinkboxsoftware.com/fe … -pools-you

Mike, you’re awesome. Thanks for all your help! I think that page on limits is going to be what I need!

So I’ve got the limits whitelisting certain machines, and the limits are attaching to the jobs when I submit, but the jobs seem to be ignoring limits. On our two test slave machines, one has ‘nuke_render’ and one doesn’t. Both are jumping onto ‘nuke_render’ jobs. As near as I can tell I’ve set everything up correctly.


As near as I can tell, it’s completely ignoring the limits. What am I missing?

Sorry for continuing to spam the boards. I realized that the entry needed to be a string of comma-separated limits, not an actual python list of limits. Changed and it works like a charm.

Thanks for the update, and glad to hear you’ve got it working. Deadline should really throw an error or filter the unnecessary characters. I’ve logged an issue for this.

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