[Radiance-general] multiprocessor systems, Radiance, and you

[Carsten Bauer]

The need for speed 1

Hi Rob,

I remember one mail of you half a year ago or so, when you already had
anticipated that step.So the time has come now, maybe earlier than
you've thought .. :-).

Unfortunately I don't know anything about Dual-processor Boards, and I'm
not up to date with the current state of Hardware, too. but I did some
work on parallell renderings some time ago. 

Now, when it comes to parallel processing, there are lots of different
ways, so probably each one of the newsgroup will give you another tip,
advertising his own solution, so let me just join in the howling of the
wolfes.

I've a reliably working PVM-Radiance Version ready at hand, if you're
interested. Currently, it's for Linux only, but the advantage of PVM is
that it can combine processes from several OS together. It would be
interesting to make it work for a combination of OS X and Linux
machines, but for this I would need some help of an OS X guru. How about
you, Rob, you probably already have developed one :) ??
Of course it is only a parallel rpict, rview is difficult to execute
parallely (cf. the discussion somewhat earlier on this list) and rtrace,
well, hmm, rtrace, I think I've never used it so far..  

I programmed the ambient value sharing via PVM, too, so there's no lock
manager problem. I did spend some time to make the whole stuff
user-friendly, but I cannot claim anything about memory efficiency, I
didn't care and just equipped every node with a sufficient amount of
RAM. Quick and dirty. Of course you need the PVM library, but that
should not shock you, as it should come automatically with Linux
distributions (at least it does so with the SuSe one which is quite
often found here in Europe.) So if you already have some machines in a
Linux Network, probably you needn't buy  something new. 

@->Lars: yeah, mosix, it's the same with me, I would like to try it but
didn't find the time or opportunity so far. 

The need for parallel treatment? Well, if you have just a big picture
but a rather easy scene with a little amount of sources, you may well
get away without PP. But of course there's the fun of the PP just for
itself ... 

So long

-Carsten