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Tyler Britton2
I am working for a company that is new to setting up Houdini on their farm. We have Houdini 17.5 working just fine, and want to roll it out to onto their Linux farm with some Engine licenses. Their Deadline version they are using is version 6, not 10 which is the latest version.

I was wondering if it is possible to get Houdini PDG working on their farm without upgrading to upgrade to Deadline 10.
If this is not possible, and we had to get Deadline 10 on a few machines to get PDG working, what the setup process was and if there are good walkthroughs how to set it up. We have Deadline working with Gaffer and Nuke, we should just have to add Houdini PDG to it.
seelan
While the shipped PDG Deadline scheduler node was developed against Deadline 10, I am not sure if it will work with Deadline 6 out of the box. Since you have the farm already setup, you can do a quick test to see whether it works. In terms of setup, please see the Deadline node documentation: https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/nodes/top/deadlinescheduler.html [www.sidefx.com]

In addition, in Houdini, you need to set the repository path and mounted folder on the Deadline scheduler node parm interface. Then set the $HFS/bin/hython and $HFS/bin/python paths properly (either directly on the node's parm interface if all machines are using same path, or through Deadline's Path Mapping window). See updated instructions here: https://www.sidefx.com/forum/topic/62237/. [www.sidefx.com]

If it doesn't work with Deadline 6, it should be fairly straightforward to create a custom version that does. I noticed that Deadline 6 uses job and plugin files to schedule the job, which the Deadline node creates automatically. It then calls deadlinecommand to schedule the job passing in the path to the 2 files. I would guess that only minimal changes are necessary to the shipped python script to work with Deadline 6. The code for the Deadline scheduler node is found in $HFS/houdini/pdg/types/schedulers/tbdeadline.py. You can copy this script, change the name, change the template name, then modify the plugin/job files and deadlinecommand call, as needed. Then place the new script in the PDG Python path, which is located in the home directory (e.g. /home/username/houdini17.5/pdg/types/ or CUsers/username/Documents/houdini17.5/pdg/types/). Restart Houdini, and the new scheduler should be available under the Schedulers tab in TOPs.
You can find more information about creating a custom scheduler here, in case you run into problems: https://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini/tops/custom_scheduler.html [www.sidefx.com]
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