How to use clustering for workers
Lets say you wish to partition your render farm into two departments, post and promo. Qube! supports the idea of partitioning your render farm into "clusters". You can divide up your farm between any number of departments, while still allowing the departments to share the machines.
As an example, you could allocate some of your render nodes to the /post cluster, and some to the /promo cluster (Qube! workers - your render nodes - belong to one and only one cluster). Users would submit their jobs to either the /post cluster or the /promo cluster - this can be configured so that it's transparent to the user.
A worker in the /post cluster will run the lowest-priority job in the /post cluster before it will run the highest-priority job in the /promo cluster.
A worker in the /promo cluster will run the lowest-priority job in the /promo cluster before it will run the highest-priority job in the /post cluster.
You could also add machines to the / cluster (the "root" cluster). Workers in the / cluster will give equal priority to jobs from all departments.
The simplest way to set a worker's cluster is in WranglerView running on the supervisor, see:Centralized Worker Configuration.
The relavant configuration parameter is worker_cluster.
worker_cluster = /post
Clustering and restrictions
Optionally, some or all workers in either the /post or /promo cluster can be configured to only run jobs in their respective clusters via the worker_restrictions value. You can have some of the /post workers be available to promo department if there are no post jobs, while other /post workers will remain dedicated to the post department.
The most common case is that the worker is restricted to only accepting jobs that are submitted into the worker's cluster:
worker_cluster = /promo
worker_restrictions = /promo
but more complex scenarios are outline in the documentation for worker_restrictions.