Sim crash on render farm

[hstone]

Hi,

I just have a slight issue and I'm hoping there is a way to get around this via maxscript or something.

I send my simulations to our render farm to simulate overnight (in backburner mode) however halfway through it seems to crash, then it loads up again and starts from the beginning again then crashes around the same spot. This becomes an infinite loop. I have tested these files on my PC, it still crashes but I can just use the continue simulation and then it finishes.

Is there a way to tell Fumefx to skip frames it has already simulated while in the backburner mode? This would really be helpful and save me loads of time of having to simulate on my own pc.

Thanks
Hayden

[sitnisati]

Hello,

At this point it is only possible to start the simulation in the backburner mode - it's not possible to continue the sim.

Regards,
Kresimir Tkalcec

[hstone]

Ok thanks for letting me know. So for the specific files that crash over the network I just need to simulate them on my own pc.

Another quick question, At the moment I have an i7 - 3930k 3.2ghz cpu. I'm trying to justify getting a dual cpu machine which should be double the speed of my current one. Will this cut my simulation time in half as I'll have twice as many cores?

I enquired about this on the chaosgroup forums as well, they said it was better to get 1 cpu with 20/24 cores instead as that would work better. Would that be the same for Fumefx?

Thanks
Hayden

[sitnisati]

Hello,

Yes, that would be better as well, but even with 2x the cores on the same CPU, the speed increase will not be 2x, but much less as there are many bottlenecks such as the CPU-memory bandwidth, cache size, thread synchronizations inside the code, etc.. I assume that even getting 20 cores CPU won't be even 50% faster than your current CPU, but this is just my assumption.

Regards,
Kresimir Tkalcec

[hstone]

Thanks very much for that information, appreciate it.

[sitnisati]

You're welcome!