Introduction to Creating a Job

Introduction to Creating a Job

This page guides you through developing an example job using Open Job Description, after setting up and configuring the Visual Studio Code editor to help you write Open Job Description templates.

The job generates frames of an animation using Blender, then encodes those rendered frames into an mp4 video using FFmpeg. We illustrate a fast development loop using the Open Job Description CLI to iteratively test the Job on your workstation. The steps make small incremental changes to more easily narrow in on the root causes of errors. This process has faster iterations than repeatedly submitting the Job to your scheduling system, and can be done in a cafe or airplane without an internet connection before later running it on a deployed compute cluster.

If you have not already read through How Jobs Are Constructed and How Jobs Are Run then we recommend starting with those first. Those pages provide context that will help you understand the remainder of this guide.

1. Toolchain Setup
2. Starting with shell scripts
   1. Creating a shell script to render with Blender
   2. Creating a shell script to encode a video with FFmpeg
3. Creating a Job Template
   1. Embed the scripts into a Job Template
   2. Parameterizing the template
   3. Path Mapping
   4. Adding Task Parallelism
4. Ready for Production
   1. Condition testing using environments
   2. Adding host requirements
   3. The final result

We've just scratched the surface of what you can do with a Open Job Description Job Templates. To learn more we recommend:

1. Taking a look through the samples to get some more ideas;
2. Creating your own templates for the kinds of Jobs that you are interested in; and
3. Ask questions in our Discussion Forums.