Multiple Worker Setup

This section covers the additional details you’ll need to setup a real Buildcat render farm on multiple machines. If you haven’t already, we strongly recommend that you create a single-machine farm using the Tutorial documentation before proceeding.

Shared Storage

You’ll need to ensure that your shared storage is accessible to every worker that will be running jobs, and every client that will be submitting jobs. To do so, you’ll have to enable network file sharing for the shared storage directory on your platform. After doing so, we recommend that you manually verify that all of your worker and client hosts can access the shared storage before proceeding.

Note

Keep in mind that BUILDCAT_ROOT will vary from host-to-host depending on the platform and whether it’s being accessed locally or across the network. For example, on a Mac named Aurora hosting shared storage on an external drive named Farm, BUILDCAT_ROOT would be /Volumes/Farm. On the other Mac and Linux hosts on the network, BUILDCAT_ROOT would be //Aurora/Farm. On Windows hosts, it would be \\Aurora\Farm.

Network Communication

All of your workers and clients will need to communicate with the server, so you’ll need to identify a public network address on the server host that they can access. For example, instead of 127.0.0.1, which can only be accessed by processes running on the local host, you’ll need the address of an ethernet or wireless interface on the machine where the server is running. You should verify that all of your workers and clients can ping the server at that address.

We’ll use the address 192.168.2.1 for our server throughout the rest of this section.

Server

When we ran the Buildcat server in Tutorial, it defaulted to the loopback address 127.0.0.1, which meant that it would only accept connections from workers and clients running on the same host. Now, we need the server to accept connections from other machines, using a public server address. To do so, just specify the server’s network address at startup:

$ buildcat server --bind 192.168.2.1

Now, the server will be listening at the given address, allowing workers and clients to connect from other machines.

Workers

Now that we’ve changed the address that the server is listening on, we have to tell workers to contact it at that address (and we have to point them to the correct BUILDCAT_ROOT directory for their platform):

$ cd <local BUILDCAT_ROOT>
$ buildcat worker --host 192.168.2.1

There is no secret to running multiple workers for your farm - simply start as many workers as you need, on multiple hosts or even the same host, pointing them to the server’s address.

Clients

Similarly, clients will need to specify the server address to submit jobs:

$ buildcat worker-info --host 192.168.2.1

Keep in mind that, now that we’re running multiple workers, the job may be run on any one of them, so that the information returned by the worker-info job in this example will change depending on the host and worker where it was handled.