Booking system of inhouse render farm?

[Jon Berntsen]

Hi

 

How do you manage your in-house render farm to avoid nodes already running on another project when you really need it to finish up your own project?

 

Any booking systems? I know this can be done easy with a sheet kind of solution, with the sheet showing a calendar on a wall mounted ipad or something. Often it's useful to see the booked time demands, not only on your computer or phone, but on a common monitor in the office... It's all about planning. You're out for some pretty bad weather if you have to knock down because you had to render it all on your workstation just because one of your colleagues used the render farm to render out his project - and you both really planned to render during that weekend or so.

 

Promising a delivery date depends on how the planned render farm workload during the days/weeks before looks like, and hence it becomes a project manager tool as well as a resource for the 3d guys who HAS to plan their job according to this "booking system".

 

 

Open for suggestions, thanks!

Edited February 5, 2017 by chroma

[Jeff Mottle]

Most people use one of these:

 

http://deadline.thinkboxsoftware.com/

http://www.pipelinefx.com/

[Jon Berntsen]

Thanks Jeff. Looks like some good and huge systems - probably too much for our office though. I may have landed on setting it up as a meeting room in Outlook. There are probably a lot of project management tools where you can control resources, but since we already have both backburner to monitor jobs and a project management tool, the need is just to have the render farm controlled as a resource. Again, after some thinking, Outlook might do the job...

[Tommy L]

We just shout out loud "hey, who's using the farm?!" and come to a consensus that way. Sometimes its good to have things manual as it makes people communicate. Its all too easy to get your head down and be anti-social in the studio.

[SkylineArch]

We use Qube at work, the advantage over an Outlook system is that everyone can add their jobs to the queue, so the farm will never sit unused, or have to be managed over the weekend or at night.

[jackbird]

Yeah, I'm not really seeing what you're asking for that Backburner (if you're broke or masochistic) or Deadline (if you're not broke and enjoy being happy) don't handle.

 

Between being able to assign higher or lower priority to a render job, being able to set up job dependencies, and being able to assign certain jobs to certain machines or pools of machines, those tools (along with a whiteboard that lets one team claim the right to give their jobs high priority) have everything you need covered.

[Scott Schroeder]

If you have multiple jobs stepping over each other and it is a constant occurrence, then you need to do 2 things. Either invest in a larger and more powerful render farm or invest in getting your render times down to manageable times. Even if you get a more powerful farm, it still may be worth it to look at your settings and see if they are really necessary. It is always good to see if you are wasting time and effort by pixel f*cking your image to death to clear up that singular pixel of noise?

 

We just ended up DR'ing everything with really reducing our render times by checking our presets. Throw the entire farm at one job at a time and things get done faster than pizza delivery times.