running different processor counts on different jobs

[mekrender]

Is there an easy way to set up Workers so that they will accept multiple After Effects frames but only a single Maya Mental Ray frame at a time?

Since Mental Ray will use all the cores/threads we would like to only have one frame running on a worker, but it is often fastest to have multiple After Effects frames running concurrently.

The number of processor slots available in the Host/Worker Layout can be set for either AE or Maya but not both.  Is there a way to make this job type specific?

[dmeyer]

I don't believe there is a way to set it globally but you could do it via Reservations at submit time.

Set  host.processors=1+   for the MR jobs and each machine will only take one subjob.

[mekrender]

That will work, so that's how reservations works:) I will just have to make sure and update the defaults for Maya submissions everywhere.  Thanks for the tip!

[dmeyer]

No problem.  You could also use the reservations to fine tune the subjob distribution on the AE jobs too.

For instance, if you have 10 blades that are 8 cores each, you will by default have 80 total subjob slots.  If you submit a particular AE job and define CPUs(subjobs) to equal 16 without using reservations, Qube may submit 8 subjobs to blade 1 and 8 subjobs to blade 2, leaving blades 3-10 idle.  Instead you could define host.processors=2, which would limit each blade to 4 subjobs (8/2=4) and the job would spread across a minimum of 4 blades. 

This can help balance network traffic a bit with AE in particular, as running 8 AE subjobs on one machine means you'd have 8 subjobs pulling footage over 1 physical network connection.