Phoenix Backburner script and license question

[elyptic]

Hi, when I submit a job using the new PhoenixFD menu "Submit Simulation to Backburner..." it asks for the Manager name or IP, and I've entered it correctly. It submits to the manager, but doesn't let me assign the server to it and begins trying to do it on its own. The Manager machine is not a fast machine, but before it gets very far it says 'could not obtain a license' and fails.

If we can only simulate on one machine at a time (no 'Distributed Simulation' anywhere) wouldn't it make more sense to give more sim nodes with purchase like we got render nodes with V-Ray? I see I have one interface license and one render license which I take it to mean one full GUI (inside 3dsmax) plus one network sim node, correct? So technically I should be able to run the sim within 3dsmax and have a different sim running in BB.

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Hey,

Backburner is very tedious in letting us provide a custom Group, but I hope I can get back to trying more way to do it soon.

Regarding multiple sim licenses bundles in the installations, it's up to the Sales guys to decide what the default package would contain - you can drop them a mail at sales@chaosgroup.com so that they would know there is demand for a different configuration. Right now one GUI and one sim license mean that a sim can run on just a single machine at a time - simulating with your 3ds Max / Maya running in interactive mode means both the GUI license and a sim license would be engaged, and simulating in batch mode / backburner mode would consume just a sim license. Not that we can't do a distributed sim simultaneously on many machines, yet - so it's not yet an analogue of how V-Ray works. With multiple sim licenses you could run different sims on different machines. I hope I can find time to extend the interface in order to allow you to send one sim with varying parameters over several machines on the network and then compare the results. We could also go for splitting a fire/smoke sim in pieces and sending them over to different machine, which sometimes would not look too ugly

Cheers!

[elyptic]

OK I see, well if there's only one sim allowed per 1 (interface) + 1 (render) license (be it only in my workstation *or* the network) then I guess the only way to make this efficient would be to create the sims and submit them one at a time to BB and wait.

I figured one could be doing the heavy lifting (the render license, doing full resolution sim) while you tweak another one in the interface, maybe with lower resolution to make corrections. It sounds like that itself would require a second render license.

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Ah, well while you are tweaking the settings, the sim license is not engaged, so you should be able to do that

[elyptic]

I don't think there's much use in tweaking settings when you can't test the results, though I guess you could stop the network sim and start a local sim. Makes more sense to have 2 sim licenses I think.

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Yup, I can't think of many realistic cases when changing settings on one machine and simulating on another would make sense, except if your machine has awful hardware or is busy with something else.

[elyptic]

If you only have one interface license, are working solo, but have several high powered machines on your network, it makes perfect sense to do all your work on your best machine (my workstation) and submit it to your nodes to do their 36 hour individual simulation jobs. I would not want to tie up my workstation (with its high end GPU etc) doing sim jobs; this thing is for modeling and animation as well.

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Hey, a small update - in Monday's nightly there will be Groups support for the BB submitter

[elyptic]

I'm not sure what that means, but hooray! I don't suppose it's possible to use a nightly alongside the release version so I'll have to wait.

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Ah, well in Backburner you can put only some of all your machines in a group and name it, so now the Phoenix submission dialogue you can specify you want to send a job only to that group instead of all the machines.