Houdini - TOPs/PDG
Now Power Your SideFX TOPs and PDG Workflows with GridMarkets' Cloud
SideFX's TOPs/PDG tool is a powerful way to automate, iterate and generate complex workflows - and in an easy to use and understandable way. But to make the most of this tool, enormous amounts of computing power are needed. This is where GridMarkets can help. Now, you can cook tens of thousands of work items using our submission pipeline and massive compute resources.
If you have any questions about our TOPs solution or would like to see a demo, feel free to contact us at support@gridmarkets.com.
GridMarkets' proprietary tool set is designed to marry your existing TOPs workflow with our own Render Submit job submission pipeline, our TOPs/PDG support has been tested internally to be capable of cooking tens of thousands of work items by leveraging up to 100 machines at once.
Example use cases include wedging for rapid iterating of scenes and effects, NFT generation, chunk rendering and more.
This tool is designed to work through ROPs and to integrate with the existing GridMarkets pipeline. When jobs are submitted, the work items on the target node are evenly partitioned by the worker machines and each machine processes a single partition of the set. This setup allows the jobs to be cooked by our farm, but it does come with a few caveats which you should be aware of, including:
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It is designed around Static Work Items. Dynamic Work Items will likely cause unexpected delays or uneven distribution of computation over the worker machines.
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The default behavior for TOPs/PDG for skipping work items which have been completed occurs, but occasionally can miss the detection of outputs and attempt to recook. When doing a dependent workflow (similar to what is possible with our Cloud Cache SOP) the use of our new Cloud Prepare TOP helps to manage this behavior and prevent unnecessary recooking.
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Additionally, as a consequence of the work item skipping behavior, sometimes jobs may finish more quickly than expected as the outputs from previous jobs may be used to trigger the skipping. This is usually a good thing as it saves credits (money), but if you are wanting to re-render or re-cache a job, you should delete any outputs which already exist through Envoy.
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As an additional layer of protection for users, we are requiring that any PDG job be set with a reasonable budget and to Terminate once the budget is reached. Any PDG job which overcooks or behaves in a way which causes a job to become more expensive than reasonably expected that is not setup with a budget and terminate behavior will NOT be eligible for a refund.
If you have any questions about our TOPs solution or would like to see a demo, feel free to contact us at support@gridmarkets.com.
KEYWORDS: TOPs, Houdini, Workflows, Work items, Automation, Computing power, Complex, Pipeline, Processing time, Integration, Render, Job submission, Computational demands, Simultaneously, Optimized, Iteration, Nodes, Dependencies, Networks, Task-based