User Guide

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Using Apple Qmaster 3
The Apple Qmaster system provides automated work
distribution and processing for high-volume projects created
with Shake and other digital visual effects software packages.
This document describes the Apple Qmaster application, one of several applications
in the Apple Qmaster distributed processing system. The complete system includes
controls for configuring clusters of processing computers and to monitor, pause,
resume, or cancel work that has been submitted.
The Apple Qmaster application described in this document is the “client interface”
that you use to submit jobs for distributed processing. Apple Qmaster can accept jobs
from Shake, Autodesk Maya, and any UNIX command-line program. For information
on how to create a complete network for Apple Qmaster processing, and on how the
Apple Qmaster application works with the rest of the Apple Qmaster system, see the
Distributed Processing Setup guide.
This document describes:
 The Apple Qmaster Distributed Processing System (p. 4)
 The Apple Qmaster Interface (p. 6)
 Submitting Batches for Apple Qmaster Processing (p. 11)
 Creating an Extended Node Cluster (Using Nodes Without Apple Qmaster
Installed) (p. 23)
 Setting Environment Variables in Apple Qmaster (p. 26)
 Command-Line Usage in Apple Qmaster (p. 28)