Apple Compressor (4.0) - Manual (Page 234)

Chapter 8 Use Apple Qmaster to set up a distributed processing system 234
Rendering services and shared storage setup
Here are some tips for setting up an Apple Qmaster “render farm.”
Change the number of rendering service instances
By default, Apple Qmaster enables one rendering service per core. On a dual-core system, you’ll
have two rendering services enabled by default. That means, for example, that two copies
of Shake will be running at the same time on a dual-core system. You may need to disable a
rendering service. For more information about changing the number of rendering services, see
Creating service nodes and cluster controllers overview on page 222.
Note: If you’re using Shake, you can always change the number of processors Shake uses at
submission time by using
‑cpus x , where x is the number of threads to use.
Set up shared volumes
For all the nodes in the cluster to know where to find assets needed for any given batch,
the nodes must have a common volume to work from. There are many ways to set up file
sharing. For more information, see the OS X documentation about file sharing and the OS X
Server documentation.
Use distributed processing with Shake
Follow the instructions below to set up distributed processing to use with Shake.
Stage 1: Turn off the UNC setting
To make sharing and volume mounting work smoothly in this setup, you need to turn off the
Shake UNC setting on each computer. The UNC setting uses the entire file pathname, with the
network address, in a convention that starts with //ComputerName/DriveName/path. You don’t
want Shake to use this filenaming convention because it conflicts with the file sharing and
volume mounting used in this setup.
Note: All the media volumes should have the same name.
In the three steps below, you make this change in a Shake startup .h file. As described in the
Shake documentation, the startup .h files, located in the startup directory, are used to customize
Shake settings (similar to setting preferences).
1 Log in as the user who will use Shake on the computer.
2 Double-click the Terminal icon in /Applications/Utilities/ to open a Terminal window.
3 Enter these two command lines in the Terminal window, pressing Return after each command line:
mkdir ‑p ~/nreal/include/startup/
echo 'script.uncFileNames = 0;' > ~/nreal/include/startup/UNC_off.h
To complete the process, repeat steps 1 to 3 on the other computer.
Stage 2: Turn on file sharing
m Turn on file sharing for each computer in the cluster.
For more information, see the OS X documentation.