Blender is the free and open source 3D creation suite. It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline—modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, even video editing and game creation.
Blender on Biowulf is meant for command-line rendering. The .blend file should be created outside of Biowulf, as none of the nodes have proper graphic cards with support for OpenGL, required for running the GUI.
NOTE: Blender running in commandline/batch mode with --background may still attempt to connect graphics to an X11 server. To avoid errors, a "fake" X11 server can be started to intercept these connections:
Xvfb -shmem -screen 0 1280x1024x24 & export DISPLAY=":0"
Allocate an interactive session and run the program.
Sample session (user input in bold):
[user@biowulf]$ sinteractive --cpus-per-task=8 --gres=gpu:p100:1 salloc.exe: Pending job allocation 46116226 salloc.exe: job 46116226 queued and waiting for resources salloc.exe: job 46116226 has been allocated resources salloc.exe: Granted job allocation 46116226 salloc.exe: Waiting for resource configuration salloc.exe: Nodes cn3144 are ready for job [user@cn3144 ~]$ Xvfb -shmem -screen 0 1280x1024x24 & [user@cn3144 ~]$ export DISPLAY=":0" [user@cn3144 ~]$ module load blender CUDA/12.1 [user@cn3144 ~]$ cp $BLENDER_EXAMPLES/fishy_cat.blend . [user@cn3144 ~]$ blender -t ${SLURM_CPUS_ON_NODE} -noaudio --background --render-output run/output --render-frame 1 -E CYCLES fishy_cat.blend -- --cycles-device CUDA ... [user@cn3144 ~]$ exit salloc.exe: Relinquishing job allocation 46116226 [user@biowulf ~]$
Create a batch input file (e.g. blender.sh). For example:
#!/bin/bash Xvfb -shmem -screen 0 1280x1024x24 & export DISPLAY=":0" module load blender CUDA/12.1 blender -t ${SLURM_CPUS_ON_NODE} -noaudio --background file.blend --render-output run/output -E CYCLES [.blend file] -- --cycles-device CUDA
Submit this job using the Slurm sbatch command.
sbatch -p gpu --gres=gpu:p100:1 [--cpus-per-task=#] [--mem=#] blender.sh