Running many parallel v-rep instances
Posted: 30 Oct 2019, 10:00
As part of evolutionary robotics research, we are hoping to run many parallel instances of V-Rep simultaneously for evaluating the members of each population; potentially up to 64 threads on a 2990WX Threadripper-based PC. This raises some interesting questions that we have no idea how to answer:
- Will this require a separate virtual machine for each instance? Early tests suggest that when two instances are run on the same machine, only one of them is able to successfully save out to file, which might suggest that there is some conflict like the use of common directories for run-time files. If so, obviously running a lot of virtual machines would be very inefficient, so it'd be much better to avoid this - any suggestions for alternative strategies?
- Assuming that we need hardware graphics processing to handle cameras/visual sensing on the robots, how might the graphics hardware be shared between the threads? Also, how much GPU power might that then require? This is a really important question as we haven't bought the computer hardware yet and graphics hardware is easily the most widely variable in terms of potential cost.
Any thoughts, insights, experience or suggestions would be hugely welcome! Thank you :)
- Will this require a separate virtual machine for each instance? Early tests suggest that when two instances are run on the same machine, only one of them is able to successfully save out to file, which might suggest that there is some conflict like the use of common directories for run-time files. If so, obviously running a lot of virtual machines would be very inefficient, so it'd be much better to avoid this - any suggestions for alternative strategies?
- Assuming that we need hardware graphics processing to handle cameras/visual sensing on the robots, how might the graphics hardware be shared between the threads? Also, how much GPU power might that then require? This is a really important question as we haven't bought the computer hardware yet and graphics hardware is easily the most widely variable in terms of potential cost.
Any thoughts, insights, experience or suggestions would be hugely welcome! Thank you :)