The "Job Manager" is RealFlow's control centre for network simulations. This window is actually a web browser with HTML and even JavaScript support, but that is only a side effect, because this feature is necessary to call the "Job Manager's" web interface. The "Job Manager's" window can be seen as a status window. To monitor the current simulation state it is necessary to start the external "Job Manager" application first. The server will control and distribute the simulation job over the connected "Job Nodes". To check the current status, only the external "Job Manager" application must be running. When you add nodes to your network, the server will recognize them and display the relevant information in the web interface directly inside RealFlow.

This tool allows you to use more than one computer for effective network simulations of so-called IDOCS. An IDOC is an “Independent Domain Of Computation”. IDOCs can be added to a scene like any other node, but they do not contribute actively to a simulation – they act like “Null” nodes. From the “Icon Bar” or the appropriate right-click menu you can add IDOCs for any standard particle emitter and simulate over a network. The idea behind this concept is that it is not always necessary to simulate interactions between different particle sources, because such an interplay does not always enhance realism or there is simply no interplay. One could say that these fluids are independent from each other and therefore it is possible to spread their calculation over several machines in a network. For this purpose, RealFlow offers a "Job Manager" application to establish the connection between your network computers and monitor the progress.

The following descriptions are only related to the "Job Manager" web interface. A complete guide to RealFlow's network capabilities can be found under "Simulation - Network". There you will also learn how to install and adjust the various applications.

The Web Interface

Before you start, please adjust the appropriate "Preferences" and launch the external "Job Manager" application. Detailed information can be found under "Network Simulations". Without this program running, the interface remains blank and shows a warning message:

Connection Not Established

To open the web interface, which carries the control over the job manager, you have two options:

From your Internet browser
Directly within RealFlow’s "Job Manager" window: Main Menu > Layout > Job Manager

In both cases you can see an empty line for a web address. There it is required to enter the "Job Manager’s" address and the port, the server is bound to. To open the interface you have to know the IP address of the computer, where the manager application is currently running, for example:

http://192.168.1.15:8080

The "Job Manager" window is a working web browser, and if you enter a web address of your choice, RealFlow directly connects to the Internet and loads the desired page. However, please note that Next Limit cannot guarantee your computer’s security while browsing through the web.

The "Job Manager" window in RealFlow.

You can see basic information about date, time and network bindings. Additionally there are three tables, containing data about currently processed jobs, available (= running) nodes and workgroups. “Job Manager Actions” offers a variety of functions to manage your jobs. The “Log” section is a mirror of the most recent manager application’s messages.

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