Well,
last two days I am learning about rendering, and in one moment I started to think how nice would be to have something like -H host1,2,3… option for mantra rendering, but for simulation cooking… so the question is, is it totally impossible or not?

It's not currently possible, but the way hardware is going, multiple cores are the better way to go IMHO. I'm not buying another computer for work that isn't at least 8 cores, and some of the engines in DOPs do indeed multicore. If you split over machines, you'd need to deal with licensing. With one DOPs session, you could be running 8 threads on one token.

the ‘-j’ parameter to hbatch or mantra defaults to ‘-1’, which means use as many threads as possible. We've set up the grid so that when we submit either a render or an hbatch process, we can specify a maximum number of threads, and it will use that or less, whichever is the most, using that flag.

AFAIK, hbatch can't split a process out over more than one machine, which is what you want for DOPs. As a suggestion, though, the way to do DOPs sims is to do wedges - submit a bunch of sim tests, each with a different setup, to a farm. One per machine, it gives you more results over the same time.

Cheers,

J.C.

ok, I got the point, thanks for explaining it.