[Radiance-general] ranimate, recovering from broken rpicts?

[Greg Ward]

Hi Lars,

Jack is correct.  Ranimate recovers frames using the following method:

1) Checks "STATUS" file to see where it left off with filtered frames.
2) Starts batch of filtering processes (in parallel according to your  
ranimate input file).
3) For each filtering process that fails (presumably due to  
unfinished rpict output), ranimate starts serial rpict recovery  
processes, one after the other, using local node so it can be sure of  
new rpict exit status.
4) If these rpict runs fail, or pfilt fails afterwards, ranimate  
gives it up as a bad job.

In your case, it might be better to manually start rpict -ro on each  
of the failed frames on separate nodes in your cluster, so the  
processes are not run in serial.

Using ranimate to break up the rendering of large images rather than  
rpiece is a clever idea I had not heard before.  Rpiece has the same  
problem as ranimate with recovering aborted processes, forcing it to  
go through and find the redo the pieces one by one in a serial fashion.

-Greg

> From: Jack de Valpine <jedev at visarc.com>
> Date: February 18, 2006 3:59:53 PM PST
>
> Hi Lars,
>
> I am not sure that I can answer everything here. But I will offer  
> what I can. I believe that the recovery mode does operate as one  
> (1) process not multiple. It would be too difficult to keep track  
> of what is being recovered if there were multiple processes, rather  
> with one process it just steps through to pick up anything that is  
> unfinished. I believe that it is checking for .unf frames not .pic  
> filtered frames.
>
> Hope this helps a bit.
>
> -Jack
>
> Lars O. Grobe wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> it is the first time I ran into trouble with ranimate... I use it,  
>> no, not render animations, but to distribute single picture  
>> renderings over an openmosix cluster (I simply use three host  
>> lines pointing to localhost). Now my rpicts died because of lack  
>> of memory (they all tried to migrate to one node at once), and I  
>> restarted ranimate in the hope that it would continue rendering  
>> (the pictures rendered almost one week so far, and I donot want to  
>> start at zero again). I was surprised by the following:
>>
>> - When rpict failed, the frames were still filtered by pfilt, so I  
>> have frame001-003.pic in the output directory now.
>> - Still, ranimate found that something went wrong, as it started  
>> with -ro. I hope it will not get confused by the fact there is  
>> already a target file frame001.pic.
>> - Strange enough, ranimate recovered, but now it started just one  
>> process, though there are three broken (unfinished) frames and  
>> more waiting in the viewfile. Will it try to recover the three  
>> frames one by one instead of starting processes on all nodes now?  
>> That will take a very long time too complete, and my machines are  
>> getting lazy ;-)
>>
>> So, many questions from a ranimate-beginner (and mis-user, but I  
>> don't want to imagine how much time it will take to render an  
>> animation of that scene...)
>>
>> CU Lars.