On 08/09/2010 03:23 PM, Michael Miles wrote: > JD wrote: >> On 08/09/2010 01:37 PM, Michael Miles wrote: >> >>> Kwan Lowe wrote: >>> >>>> On Sun, Aug 8, 2010 at 1:52 PM, Michael Miles<mmamiga6@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: >>>> >>>> >>>> >>>>>> >>>>> Well, 3D animation is my thing and has been since the Amiga platform. >>>>> The power to render many minutes of animation and still have functional >>>>> machine to do the rest of my daily activity. >>>>> >>>>> I use a virtual machine running windows 7 for my animation software and >>>>> if I want to convert a HD movie at the same time as I do everything else >>>>> it shows a definite slow down. >>>>> >>>>> >>>> I run a 4-node rendering cluster ( dual quad-cores on each, or 32 >>>> cores total and 16G RAM each node). They're headless and just have >>>> minimal local disks. All nodes write via bonded 2 x 1Gb Ethernet to a >>>> fileserver, but network is usually not the bottleneck. When in use, >>>> CPUs are pegged for hours at a time. Modeling is done on a quad-core >>>> Windows 7 system with some relatively high-end ATI cards, but gets >>>> final render in the cluster. HD conversion is a minor step since the >>>> renders are done at final resolution. >>>> >>>> My point is that it may be more effective to separate your rendering >>>> hardware. I.e., you can buy a low-end desktop with decent video cards >>>> that will run your software natively *and* a separate, headless >>>> compute node that does all the heavy lifting rather than try to bulk >>>> up a desktop. The desktop will generally have crappy disk i/o, crappy >>>> memory limits (8G is average), crappy network (wireless or GBit), and >>>> your CPU will be busy drawing a pretty desktop than actually rendering >>>> frames. >>>> >>>> >>> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- >>> >>> >>> >>> I have noticed a bit of a confusing issue. >>> Lightwave running under Win 7 as a virtual machine under Fedora 12 runs >>> faster than a native Win 7 machine. >>> Strange but true. >>> >>> It easily shaves off 2 - 3 minutes / frame as a virtual machine. >>> >>> >>> Anyway thanks for the comments. >>> Question is there a way to have all my cores assigned to one task? >>> I can easily dedicate the cores to a virtual machine but in a native >>> Fedora environment I was wondering if I can get all cores to work on one >>> task. >>> >>> >>> And one other question. >>> >>> What software are you using for your render cluster? >>> >>> >>> Way back in the Amiga days I was using Renderman as a rendering farm and >>> the Screamernet for the Video Toaster. >>> >>> I have been doing some experimentation with Blender and it looks very >>> good but I'm still looking at Lightwave 9 as the best. It is only ported >>> for Windows though making it a pain as I would like very much to use a >>> native linux enviroment. >>> >>> >>> It also seems that Lightwave butterfly netrender for linux is here >>> >>> http://www.weez.com/2010/08/linux-lightwave-render-farm-getting-bnr-butterfly-netrender-to-work-in-debian-possibly-others/ >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> We shall see!!!! >>> >>> >>> >>> >>> >> You can - but indirectly. >> if the process is multithreaded and you want all the cores working on >> those threads, then >> when you start up the process: >> sudo nice -n -10 ProcessPathName >> >> will very likely force all threads get on-core before other threads. >> >> Danger: There are some system processes that MIGHT get preempted by such >> a low priority. Se you need to research to see at what priority (nice >> level) are all the system tasks running. >> >> > That does work but yes, the system had a bird as soon as I pressed enter > If I wanted to say use 3 out of 4 on a single process and use the 4th > free core for the system how would I go about that? > > Thank you by the way!!! > > > Michael > > To do that, you need a library interface or sysctl command line that would "affine" the process and it's threads to to a set of cpu's (I am not certain if there is granularity here as far as selecting a subset of cores from a cpu). I do not know if such lib call or sysctl command exists for this purpose. I was aware of it (library call) in the SVR4-smp kernel. But it's been a long time and I do not recall the lib call. -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
