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View Full Version : Few questions about MR Satellite

kbrown
09-21-2005, 01:15 AM
Hey,

We've just begun to use satellite at work. We got three workstations and a ten machine farm. All dual proc machines with 2 gigs of ram. Everything works pretty much ok but few questions are still hanging in the air:

1. Satellite gets its licenses from the master, right? So in case of the master machine having Maya Unlimited on it, it can use maximum of 4 machines (8 cpus) of the farm in addition to its own procs, right? Is it possible to buy extra licenses so that the whole farm is used or do we have to consider MR standalone?

2. Satellite is supposed to handle all cpu load balancing automatically. What if multiple workstations try to use the same render slaves simultaneously (maya.rayhosts file on each workstation are identical)? Is satellite smart enough to skip the slaves already being used by someone else or do we have to take this situation into consideration in the maya.rayhosts file?

3. Satellite transfers all data to and from the participating machines automatically. This is very handy in most of the cases. However sometimes the amount of texture data etc is so much that it would be faster to do a local copy of them to the slaves. How does this work with Satellite? Where should the files be put so that it can find them locally?
Jozvex
09-21-2005, 01:27 AM
Hmmm I'm not 100% sure but here's what I think I know:

1. I think you might have to get standalone. If you buy another license of Maya Unlimited you'll get another 9 cpus but you'll need to have seperate mini render farms, one for each master. I don't think another license will simply expand the original render farm because the slaves talk directly to the copy of Maya, they don't just read the license. :hmm:

2. I don't think satellite can render to multiple masters at once, but I could be wrong.

3. I think it copies everything to C:\Documents and Settings\username\local files\temp

You can check by rendering with satellite though and looking in that folder.
kbrown
09-21-2005, 01:59 AM
3. I think it copies everything to C:\Documents and Settings\username\local files\temp

You can check by rendering with satellite though and looking in that folder.

Thanks! I forgot to mention that our slaves are linux machines.
Jozvex
09-21-2005, 02:07 AM
Oh ok! In that case I have no idea, hehe.

Maybe try asking on the Mental Ray mailing list. The details are on the Mental Images site.
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