In the Deadline Monitor application, you can monitor the progress of your render job and the render slaves, and suspend your job if necessary. Deadline Monitor is already installed on your workstation: you'll find it in Start > Programs > Rendering > Deadline > Deadline Monitor.
When you first launch Deadline Monitor, you'll be asked to choose a user account to use, or to create your own. If you wish to create your own account so that you can be notified by email regarding your renders, use your net ID as the user name and enter your email address. Otherwise, use the generic students account.
After launching Deadline Monitor, you'll be presented with the main Monitor window, from which you can submit, monitor, and control render jobs and the tasks that make up those jobs. The window is divided into three panes, each of which can be resized to your preference.
The Jobs List
The Jobs List displays all currently active and recently completed jobs.
By right-clicking on a job, you can:
- Refresh the job status
- Resume a failed job or a job which has been suspended
- Requeue all tasks for a job
- Delete the job
- Resubmit the job
- Modify the job's properties
- View History or Job Reports for the job, which will include the option to show error logs
You can also sort by clicking on the column headers, rearrange the headers by dragging them, or customize the headers by clicking on the header bar.
More info on the Jobs List can be found here.
3.
The Task List
When you highlight your render job in the Jobs List, the Task List (upper right) will display the tasks that make up your job and whether they’re pending, rendering, or completed. If your job consists of a single image, there will only be one task for the rendering of that image; if your job’s an animation, each frame will be a separate task. The window also displays which slaves are working on which tasks, and if there are any errors on the task.
By right-clicking on a task, you can:
- Requeuea completed task for rendering
- Mark Task As Complete
- Mark Task As Failed
- Resume Failed Task
- Requeue Tasks by Slave - resubmit all the tasks that a particular slave has completed, which is useful if a slave is constantly rendering bad frames
- Blacklist Slave - prevent tasks for this job from being sent to this particular slave
- Submit Task As New Job
- Task Reports - view the errors, logs, and requeue reports for a job
Keep in mind, when you requeue or resubmit a job, the output from the new job will overwrite the output of the job being resubmitted.
More info on the Task List can be found here.
A note on monitoring your job
It's always a good idea to keep an eye on your render job, particularly in the case of an animation, as you can save yourself some time and energy by fixing issues as they occur. As each frame of an animation as saved as a separate image in your Output folder on arch-render, you do not need to wait until your entire render is complete before viewing the completed frames and can check your render on the fly.
So, for example, if you notice that a particular slave is continually rendering frames incorrectly, you can blacklist that slave and requeue all tasks that particular slave has completed without interrupting your render job.
If you find a particular slave is continually having problems, please let the DM Office know.