Power Management

[p-a-rak]

Hi.

We currently have a Qube! system consisting of 200+ client machines (Windows/Linux), 1 supervisor (Linux), 14 Windows workers (3dsmax), and 38 Linux workers (XSI/MAYA). Storage is on a shared (samba) server.

The worker machines are all "Viglen" badged Supermicro servers (two machines per 1U case). Currently, all the worker machines are constantly "ON", which generates a lot of heat (and noise).

Ideally, what I'd like to do is to have the worker machines "sleep" until they are required, and then wake up, do their rendering, and after checking to make sure there are no more jobs waiting, go back to sleep.

I remember last year at the London QCA course, that Troy mentioned something about looking into this kind of thing? 

If Qube! doesn't natively support this, could it be done as a pre-amble job (wake), then have a "sleep"  job as a clean-up job.?
Obviously I'd then need to sort out my own wake and sleep scripts..

I'd appreciate any advice on this..


 

 

[jburk]

This is a feature we are planning on implementing in Qube 6.0, due out this summer.

[p-a-rak]

I'll look forward to that. 

[jburk]

After reviewing our development roadmap with customers during our Product Validation tours, this feature got reprioritized in favour of more functionality that our customers were asking us to deliver before power management.  (It got bumped down the list...)

It's currently on our roadmap for Qube 6.5, due in Q3 2012.

[joed8349]

What is the status of this power management feature? I am looking into such a feature as well.

edit:
I found this online - code to put a computer to sleep:
rundll32.exe powrprof.dll,SetSuspendState 0,1,0

I tested it as a command line job in Qube and it worked, but may need to be edited to put many computers to sleep.
I had to use a 3rd party application (wake on lan - sends a amagic packet) to wake the sleeping computer(s) though. I'm trying to figure out if it is possible to run this through Qube via command line as well, but I have no training in computer commands/coding.

I would think it wouldn't be too difficult for a programmer to create something like this for the Qube software.