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By: [ Editor ] Asked from Canada

Best way to put idle workstations to work on a renderfarm ?

We are currently relying on artists to close any opened software and inform the renderfarm system that their workstation is available to work on farm renders. Of course some of them tend to do it for the first days after we tell them and forget about it later...

What do you think is the best way to detect when a workstation is not being used (either by a user in front of it or by a locally started render or simulation), and what are the best practices in making this workstation available to the farm ? For example, are there some tools that allow the saving of opened work in temporary files in order to free the workstation's memory ?

Also, don't hesitate to comment if I forgot some aspect of the problem in my question.

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2 answers

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michalf [ Editor ]

In deadline, there's a screensaver that enables a workstation to rendering. But we don't use it, because when user works on workstation it usually has several apps running and RAM usage is high.

What we do is to reboot workstation at certain hour (after workday) and autologin to a user setup for rendering. Ofcourse user has ability to prevent rebooting for some time (but not permanently :] ) When the working day ends, the window pops up with information that reboot is going to take place in 15 minutes, and option to postpone it for maximum 72 hours. There are only few of us artists, and this scheme works pretty ok :)

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franssu_27
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This sounds reasonable. 15 minutes is more than enough even if the artist is out for a smoke…

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julian [ Admin ]

I guess you ideally want something like Nimby without having to buy Pixar tools. The common configuration was to set Nimby to only allows jobs to start on a machine when the screen saver is on. When the machine is woken up, the jobs are not kicked off automatically - the user has to manually eject them. It feels like it could be implemented as a general purpose process manager without relying on a specific render dispatch software. Sorry I don't know any existing products.

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franssu_27
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That’s a pretty neat idea, but the problem of software left open, taking potentially huge amounts of RAM still remains…

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