I don’t understand your power slider, can you explain it to me?

Sure!  The power slider controls how many CPU’s we expose to your render job while it’s running on our farm.  Lower Power values get fewer CPU’s, while higher Power values get more.  For another point of comparison, the lowest Power level corresponds to a handful of CPU’s, while the highest Power level corresponds to every CPU in our farm.  The Power slider is set on a per-job basis when a job is submitted.  It can also be changed on a per-job basis while the job is running.  The more CPU’s you have rendering frames/tiles of your job, generally the faster that job will complete.

It should be noted that render farms schedule each frame of your frame range on a discreet render node.  This means that a render job containing a 15 frame range could only possibly be scheduled on up to 15 nodes.  The only exception to this is when your render job is for a still image (single frame), and it can be tile/strip split.  Please review the single frame job page for details on that.  When a single frame render job is tile/strip split, each tile/strip is scheduled on a render node as though it were a full frame.

Using high Power levels when your job has a low frame or tile/strip count is only useful to have scheduling priority over lower Power jobs in the queue.  In other words, even if your chosen Power level can expose up to 100 CPU’s to your 15 frame job, only 15 CPU’s can actually be working on it.

In the event of a saturated farm situation (Farm Load meter showing red), CPU count per-job will be reduced on a proportional basis to fairly deliver Power based on the Power setting of each job.  When the farm emerges from saturation, normal CPU counts per job will be automatically restored.