Hi Marc. We just started using Condor here at Tweak Films a couple of
months ago to replace a really lame script-based system I'd thrown
together while doing a hundred other things. It's taken a bit of fussing
around to get Condor to work in our pipeline, but now that we understand
it better, it works pretty well.
We've just (almost) completed our first show using it, and we've run well
over 200,000 jobs, using over 2 1/2 years worth of CPU time since Feb. 11,
and it handled the load with only a couple of minor problems.
I ended up writing a Python module that generates all the submit files, log
file locations, output/error file locations, etc., thus isolating our
artists from all that stuff. We then have a relatively small set of
command line tools that all use that same Python module for submitting
Entropy (essentially the same as PRMan), Shake, Maya, and other jobs. I
also made an internal web page that shows the status, output, and error
logs of all running jobs, and the status of all the machines. We still
rely on out-of-the-box Condor tools for removing jobs, changing
priorities, etc.
You should check the condor-users mailing list archive for a question I
asked about pre-emption and job scheduling. Specifically, changing the
following:
START = $(START) && ( State != "Claimed" || $(StateTimer) < 20)
PREEMPT = FALSE
PRIORITY_HALFLIFE = 5
NEGOTIATOR_INTERVAL = 5
made all the difference in making Condor schedule jobs in a manner than fit
our needs. This way, Condor tries to always give users the same number of
resources (assuming user priorities are the same), regardless of previous
usage, but will never kill jobs that are already running. We do pay a
per-job overhead penalty for doing it this way, but by setting the
NEGOTIATOR_INTERVAL to 5 seconds, it's fairly minimal. Most of our tools
also have the ability to run multiple frames per Condor job, which makes
the overhead even less of an issue.
Anyway, to make a long story short, it works great for us, and you can't
beat the price!
-Mike
mike@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
On Monday 12 April 2004 01:36, Marc Anthony Pierre Barrette wrote:
hello,
is condor beeing used in the Computer Graphics industry for large
scale render farms? specifically for various render engines ie. PRMan,
Mental Ray, Maya. If anyone could point me in some direction it would be
greatly appreciated, and examples are always nifty.
thanks in advance
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