PipelineFX Releases Qube! 5.2

[Jennifer]

PipelineFX Releases Qube!? 5.2

Universal Application Support, Satellite Rendering and Full 64-bit Compatibility

Honolulu, HI ? July 18, 2007 ? PipelineFX, makers of Qube!? software, the leading render farm management software for film production, game development, and digital media education around the world, today announced the general availability of Qube! version 5.2.

?With this 5.2 release, we?ve made Qube! a platform for virtually any sized studio, school or company doing distributed rendering with literally any application,? said Scot Brew, PipelineFX?s Director of Technology. ?The new SimpleCMD feature generates easy-to-use GUIs for any commercial or internally developed application that can be distributed via a command line. Simply enter the input parameters your application requires and SimpleCMD generates a nice, user-friendly GUI for job submission.?

The Qube! 5.2 release includes:

SimpleCMD interface for generating submission GUIs quickly and easily:
?Supports any application that can accept a command line
?Easy to generate ? create new interfaces in under an hour
?Written in Python ? easy to customize
?Ships with pre-built interface for XSI 6.0

Satellite rendering support for Autodesk 3D applications:
?Support for Maya Satellite renders
?Support for 3ds Max Distributed Bucket Renders (DBR)

Full 64-bit support:
?64-bit software application support
?64-bit CPU hardware support

Enhanced application support, including:
?Maya? (updated) ? Support for Maya satellite rendering
?3ds Max? (updated) ? Support for 3ds Max Distributed Bucket Rendering
?XSI? 6.0 (new) ? SimpleCMD GUI for XSI 6.0

"Qube was built in a large feature film studio and many of the advanced features were driven by complex rendering requirements," said Troy Brooks, CEO of PipelineFX. "As we enter our 6th year selling Qube! into all sizes of VFX studios, post houses, TV stations, game companies, schools, design firms and manufacturing facilities, we are proud to provide a streamlined mechanism for render farm management. The ability to very quickly generate submission interfaces makes Qube! an easy to adopt, stable and professionally-supported render farm management option for an even wider variety of digital media customers.?

Qube! 5.2 is available immediately and will be demonstrated in booth #337 at SIGGRAPH 2007 in San Diego, California. 

                                                          ###

[shinya]

Hi Folks,

Here are the release notes for Qube! 5.2

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#######################################################################################################
#Qube 5.2 Release Notes
@RELEASE: 5.2-0

@SUMMARY:
This release includes Qube! 5.2-0

@PLATFORMS: 
Fedora Core 2.0 x86
Fedora Core 3.0 x86
Fedora Core 5.0 x86,x64
Redhat Linux 9.0 Win32
Redhat Enterprise Linux 3.0 x86
Redhat Enterprise Linux 4.0 x86,x64
Suse Linux 9.2 x86
Suse Linux 9.3 x86
Suse Linux 10.0 x86 
Suse Linux 10.1 x64
Apple OSX 10.4 Universal 
Windows 2003/XP/2000 x86,x64 

@FEATURE qbmodify Added --momithosts and --momitgroups options
@FEATURE: Added C:\Program Files (x86) to the jobtype lib path
@FEATURE: Adjusted inline qb python docs to would work with epydoc pdf generation.
@FEATURE: Improved supervisor performance using more streamlined dispatch technique. 
@FEATURE: Added modify ability to complete/done jobs for administrators
@FEATURE: Added license check to be a daily event rather than weekly.
@FEATURE: Added ability to clear the ban on a host based on macaddress
@FEATURE: Added ability to remove a host based on macaddress
@FEATURE: Added suspended to list of jobs queried for with --active flag
@FEATURE: Added additional option --forcereport to the qbadmin command to kick a worker into reporting back to the supervisor
@FEATURE: Added table repair option to upgrade_supervisor to deal with mysql crashes.  It won't completely fix the problem, but will help a little bit.  

@BUGFIX: Changing OSX to use network protocol rather than local port to compensate for OSX Server installation of mysql.
@BUGFIX: Modified mysql installation to use non standard port 3300 to prevent conflict with existing mysql installations. 
@BUGFIX: Supervisor will not immediatly shutdown if it sees a duplicate host online.  It will wait 2 minutes before shutting down. 
@BUGFIX: Added supervisor_restrict_timeout to allow the administrators to tweak how long a job is restricted from starting on a host it was rejected from. Default: 10 seconds
@BUGFIX: Addressed issues with "grid" feature.
@BUGFIX: Fixed issue with linux worker incorrectly cleaning up jobs
@BUGFIX: Added fix for reclaiming agenda items if they are recovered from a job which has been interrupted.
@BUGFIX: Fixed locking mechanism to correctly preempt or interrupt the job's on a machine.
@BUGFIX: Added fix for kill work and block work, correctly marks work returned back to the supervisor.
@BUGFIX: Adding double-quotes "" around the entire cmd.exe "<command>" to address an odd Microsoft documented behavior with multiple double quotes.  
@BUGFIX: Fixed no feedback for qblock and qbunlock.  
@BUGFIX: Fixed issue where authentication dialogs come up for both start and exit of non-admin accounts. (OSX)
@BUGFIX: Fixed problem where a host_list job is ignored if the optimize flag is turned on.
@BUGFIX: Added detection for existence of perl and python in the path before executing the job.
@BUGFIX: Modified parser to be ok with \r characters as end of lines to deal with OSX non standard text file format
@BUGFIX: Fixed issue with 4gb detection for windows. (Win32,Win64)
@BUGFIX: Fixed permissions error for qbworkerdelete and qbworkerundelete
@BUGFIX: Added flag validity check to prevent qbsub from accepting invalid flags
@BUGFIX: Added Tcp Timeout to deal with 4 minute delay of the socket shutdown on windows.
@BUGFIX: Added xinetd requirement to rpm's
@BUGFIX: Modified perl wrapper generator to correctly escape \ characters when loading the execute lib
@BUGFIX: qbsub fixed issue with --flags expand feature

[Scot Brew]

RELEASE NOTES for QubeGUI
==================

HIGHLIGHTED 5.2 FEATURES
------------------------
Added SimpleCmd framework
Added SimpleCmd xsibatch for rendering with XSI 6.0
Providing Linux QubeGUI executable
Added Job save/load functionality
Enhanced submission dialogs with email option
Saving user panel layout preferences
Added range options for cmdrange jobtype
Added elapsed time in Job, Frame, and Histogram panels

NEW 5.2 FEATURES
----------------
@FEATURE: Adding SimpleCmd framework and documentation
@FEATURE: Added support for mental ray standalone version 3.5.6.3, which ships with XSI 6.0.
@FEATURE: Updating QubeGUI to use VS2005 SP1 libraries on Windows.
@FEATURE: Adding support for 64-bit platforms
@FEATURE: Adding the SimpleCmd XSIbatch for XSI 6.0
@FEATURE: Adding better reporting for qb python module used in QubeGUI
@FEATURE: Added email-on-completion to submission dialogs
@FEATURE: Added elapsed time to AgendaList and Histogram.
@FEATURE: Compiling QubeGUI into Linux executable.  Now no dependencies need to be installed to run QubeGUI on Linux.
@FEATURE: Added mental ray satellite capability for mray standalone.
@FEATURE: Added Job # to Histogram title
@FEATURE: Sorting "farm at a glance" alphabetically
@FEATURE: Adding more Menu accelerators
@FEATURE: Storing Panel Layout preferences
@FEATURE: Added maya submission-time option to tell the jobtype to ignore render-time errors.
@FEATURE: Added "Individual", "Chunk", and "Partition" options for frame range for cmdrange jobtype
@FEATURE: Changing #!/usr/bin/python to #!/usr/bin/env python in qube.py to use the current python version
@FEATURE: Added DBR support for qubegui's 3dsmax submission dialog.
@FEATURE: Added satellite submission support in qubegui's maya submission dialog.
@FEATURE: Added Job load/save functionality to JobList rt-click menu (save), Submit menu (load), and Submit dialog (save).
@FEATURE: Added VERSION tuple to qube.py so can easily compare versions

5.2 FIXES
---------
@BUGFIX:  Scaling fonts in SimpleCmd submission dialogs for long labels clipping
@BUGFIX:  Fixing lightwave submit SetValues() issue.
@BUGFIX:  Modified Maya submission code so that if a "blank" renderer is specified, it is not transmitted w/ the job.
@BUGFIX:  Adding workaround to address wxPython occasional issue with misplacing widgets when scrolled in submission dialogs (wxPython case: 1744238).
@BUGFIX:  Fixing refresh issue with JobHistogram not visible
@BUGFIX:  Fixing slashes in Job Output Panel to better work with Windows and UNC paths
@BUGFIX:  Better reporting of callbacks in Callback Panel
@BUGFIX:  Adjusted code to work with wxPython unicode
@BUGFIX:  Using fixed-width font in text panels so tabbed columns aligned
@BUGFIX:  Added check to handle negative number of cpus in lock dialogs.
@BUGFIX:  Fixed host partial locking issue.
@BUGFIX:  Increasing log panel default and min size to address KDE Linux crash issue.
@BUGFIX:  Fix for sort() in hostGrid with python 2.3.
@BUGFIX:  Removed ability to reorder tabs on Linux until issue addressed by external wxPython developers.
@BUGFIX:  Adjusting path on Windows for Output Panel
@BUGFIX:  Streamlined icons/ directory
@BUGFIX:  Address refresh issues with panels
@BUGFIX:  Changing QB_DIR to QBDIR as the proper env variable to use for qube.sh.