I'm fairly new to PDG but I've been wedging for a while now.

I'm using Axiom to churn out explosion VDBs and whilst it's fairly fast, it can only run on one GPU as far as I can tell. If I try to use more than one, the file just breaks. (or maybe the slot count to two is trying to use the same GPU, IDK in any case I'm fine with keeping one of my 2 GPUs for windows)

It works fine when I use a custom slot count of 1 but I lose the whole strength of pdgs I feel, because i also have to wait for my opengl rop and ffmpeg and they run on a single slot too.



So my question is am I doing this correctly ? In my example there's only one work item but it was for testing purposes, it runs on 50x150 frames (so 50 work items).

Can I use a single 'slot' for just the axiom vdb generation (ideally i't be only one houdini instance and it would do all 50 sims, without the hython restart overhead) and have one or more 'slots' doing just the rest when each vdb sequence is complete: openGl ROP and ffmpeg ?

Thanks for sheding some lights!

You can limit that one node to only execute one work item at a time by adding the Local Scheduler 'single' Job Parm to that node and toggling it on.

https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/tops/schedulers.html#jobparms [www.sidefx.com]

However, since this is a Rop Fetch, you can avoid the overhead of restarting houdini for those work items by creating a Rop Fetch Service and assigning it to that node. If the service has a pool size of 1, this is also going to have the happy side effect of ensuring that only one runs at once.

https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/tops/services.html [www.sidefx.com]

Great thanks ! Will get back to you when I break stuff