[Csci3353] DRQueue on the Xeana render-farm

[John Howland]

Dear Graphics class,

It looks like we have a working render-farm with awesome performance.
Thanks should go to Neal Pape (a really smart CS grad who won
our Department's Babbage award his senior year).  Neal, it looks like  
you
re-compiled (I changed the ownership of various dirs in ~drqueue/drqueue
from root:root to drqueue:drqueue and everything worked) the system  
to use
the nis ~drqueue/drqueue path and all works well now.  Thanks!

Here's how to use the Xena render-farm (we can expand its size next  
semester if needed)

Log into one of our linux client machines and ssh -Y xena21

cd ~drqueue/drqueue
bin/drqman &

which runs the drqueue manager as a background task.
You should see information about jobs recently run on the render-farm.
Click on the Computers tab to see the render-slave machines and their
load factors (actually the load numbers are multiplied by 100).   
Click back
on the Jobs tab for the jobs screen.  Press-and-hold mouse-right over
the jobs window to get a pop-up menu and select new-job

On the New Job window first select the kind of job (Blender) and  
notice that
some lines of the form are filled in.  Next you should type in a  
complete path
to your blender scene file.  This file must be in the ~drqueue/ 
drqueue file space.
I have created the directory ~drqueue/drqueue/blender-scene/  
directory with
world writable permissions for this purpose.  I have put a file  
knight.blend there
for performance testing purposes.  It takes about 10/15 seconds to  
render a 200
frame animation at 1024x768 resolution!

You can easily select your blender file in this directory by clicking  
on the search
button for the Scene file item.  Next you should give the render job  
a name
and fill in the end frame number for your animation (200 for  
knight.blend).
Finally you should click on the Create Script button so that the  
command line
will be filled in.  You should then have a window which looks like  
the attached file
(this was a test using the knight.blend file):

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At this point you are ready to submit the job which you do by  
pressing the Submit button.
A comment about where your blender file should put its rendered  
images is necessary.

Since 4 of you will be sharing the ~drqueue/drqueue/blender-scene/  
directory, i would
suggest that you make the render path be //some-suitable-name  (I  
used //knight for the
knight.blend file).  This will cause your avi files to be written to
~drqueue/drqueue/blender-scene/some-suitable-name/ .

You should then move this directory to your file space with the command

mv ~drqueue/drqueue/blender-scene/some-suitable-name ~/

and you should also remove your blend files from ~drqueue/drqueue/ 
blender-scene/ when
you are finished using the Xena render-farm.

You may play your animation by running the command (in your render  
directory)

blender -a *.avi

May you always render quickly!

John

_______________________________________________________________
John E. Howland       url: http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~jhowland/
Computer Science    email: jhowland at ariel.cs.trinity.edu
Trinity University  voice: (210) 999-7364
One Trinity Place     fax: (210) 999-7477
San Antonio, Texas  78212-7200