[Radiance-general] Running multiple rpict commands for different scenes
Jack de Valpine
jedev at visarc.com
Wed May 18 05:15:08 PDT 2011
Hi Sotiris,
There are several things that you are going to have to figure out in
order to take advantage of the compute resources available at your
university. Hopefully there is some administrative support that can
provide some basic advice. But I think that you will need to figure out
the following, and this is likely not going to be an fast learning curve
unless you are accustomed to working with this type of system and the
scripting that will likely be involved. It will take some trial and
error, but once you get it figured out it will probably be well worth
the effort to have such a resource available.
1. You will need to figure out how you need to install your
application (Radiance) to make it accessible to the cluster.
2. You will need to figure out how to script radiance to to make the
scene changes that are needed. This might involve some selection
of: make, csh, perl, python or whatever other scripting language
you enjoy. I think that it may also be possible to control through
Matlab/Octave (see
http://web.mac.com/geotrupes/iWeb/Main%20site/RadBlog/E549E7F4-6DA2-4D78-8F91-74A4691ED86A.html
at Giulio Antonutto's site). If the only variation in your scene
is going to be the orientation of the individual blind slats, then
there are a number of ways to script this and one option might be
to consider looking at the radiance program ranimate with the
ANIMATE variable set to a script to rotates the slat geometry by a
given increment or parameter, with this you could also change
other scene conditions such as the position of the sun/sky
condition. But this could also be done with the other scripting
methods I indicate.
3. Lastly you will need to figure out how to submit your radiance
rendering job to the grid. Based on the information that you
provide it is most likely that this would be done via "qsub" which
is a job submital routine for Torque, which looks to be the
queuing system for the cluster (Maui takes care of how the
resources are actually allocated). Unfortunately this (job
submittal with qsub) also requires some scripting, however there
should be "howto" resources available from the system
administrators of the cluster. Such a script will have parameters
indicating what resources (nodes, cpus, cores and time are needed
for the job) as well as what the job comprises. In this case you
would probably want to script something that actually generates
1200 separate "jobs" that can then be submitted individually to
the cluster as resources become available. If you "owned" the
cluster you would be able to do things more simply using ranimate
to distribute the job over selected cluster nodes.
Regards,
-Jack de Valpine
--
# Jack de Valpine
# president
#
# visarc incorporated
# http://www.visarc.com
#
# channeling technology for superior design and construction
On 5/18/2011 6:29 AM, Sotiris Papantoniou wrote:
>
> Hello Lars and Christopher,
>
> My idea is to run many simulations, for now up to 1200, in order to
> create data for a fuzzy system. I have many simulations because I
> have a glass part of a building which has 4 sets of blinds which are
> autonomously controlled. If I am thinking correctly when the angle of
> each blind changes we have a new scene, which is separately simulated.
> For each scene I am running a new rpict command to see the result. I
> found out that in the University we have a grid-computer which is
> working on Linux. From the grid-computer web-site I read the following:
>
> *Translators***
>
> * C (gcc 4.1.2 gcc44 4.4.0)
> <http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-3.4.6/gcc/>
> * Fortran77 & 98 (gfortran 4.1.2 gfortan44 4.4.0)
> <http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/languages/fortran/>
> * C++ (g++ 4.1.2 g++44 4.4.0)
> <http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-3.4.6/gcc/>
> * Java (jdk 1.6.0 gcj 4.1.2) <http://java.sun.com/>
> * Python 2.4.3 <http://www.python.org/>
>
> *Data bases*
>
> * MySQL 5.0.77 <http://dev.mysql.com/doc/>
>
> *Computational****Systems***
>
> * Matlab 7.9.0 <http://www.mathworks.com/products/matlab/>
> * Octave 3.0.5 <http://www.gnu.org/software/octave/about.html>
> * R-2.12.2 <http://www.r-project.org/>
>
> * *Management systems****and****grid****operations***
> * TORQUE 2.3.6
> <http://www.clusterresources.com/products/torque-resource-manager.php>
> * openMPI 1.4.1 <http://www.open-mpi.org/>
> * maui 3.2 <http://www.clusterresources.com/products/maui/>
>
> This is the software of the grid. So I was thinking, to install
> Radiance on the grid and run the commands from it. So my main question
> is if I can use radiance on a grid-computer, and If I use the
> advantage of the grid by running in parallel the same command.
>
> For now, since I was in a hurry to get some results, I am creating the
> combinations in Matlab and I am running rpict from DOS. I know it is
> old but I for now I have in the University only an Win OS computer.
>
> I hope I managed to give you some details. If not please tell me so,
> in order to reply again.
>
> Thank you in advance for your time
>
> Sotiris
>
> *From:*Lars O. Grobe [mailto:grobe at gmx.net]
> *Sent:* Wednesday, May 18, 2011 12:14 PM
> *To:* Radiance general discussion
> *Subject:* Re: [Radiance-general] Running multiple rpict commands for
> different scenes
>
> What exactly is your question? Of course you can start multiple rtrace
> or whatever processes, they will not care about each other. If you run
> more processes then CPUs, they will slow down, same is true (even
> worse) if you exceed available memory. If you have lots of scenes, you
> can write a script to automate the handling. You may also like batch
> processing queues if you have a lot of processes to distribute. Still,
> it is impossible to answer your question if it is that general.
>
> Cheers, Lars.
>
> --
>
> Dipl.-Ing. Architect Lars O. Grobe
>
>
> On May 18, 2011, at 11:11, "Sotiris Papantoniou"
> <sotos.enveng at gmail.com <mailto:sotos.enveng at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
> Hello list again,
>
> I have a new issue concerning multiple simulations. I would run
> the same command (rpict, rtrace, rad) many times but for different
> scenes.oct. Do you know if this is possible?
>
> Thank you in advance
>
> Sotiris
>
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