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

[Peter Apian-Bennewitz]

...
> It occurred to me shortly after I posted this (and was perusing the
> rpiece man page) that rpiece really only helps rpict processes, where I
> am primarily doing lots and lots of rtraces right now.  I will look
> further at Carsten's PVM-ified Radiance, and mosix, but in the meantime
> I think this next machine will be a single CPU box.  Shoot, even one
> 2Ghz Athlon will be an improvement over my current Radiance setup, a
> wimpy PIII 450.
IMHO, additional investment in a dual motherboard plus the extra CPU is
worth it, since you share disks, opsys, ram. CPU costs are rarely 
linear with CPU speed, so you may end up with a better cost/performance
ratio with two slightly slower CPUs than with one top-notch CPU.
As Schorsch pointed out, split your rtrace input vectors to two rtraces
and half your computing time. Easy with shell or awk programming.

> having two separate boxes I gain a little redundancy to boot.
correct. Of course two dual machines are also an option....  

-Peter

PS: I had a glance at mosix, - definitely a neat idea from a kernel and
opsys perspective. However, while rendering for fun and profit, I'd
rather prefer to know what is happening on my machines. Imagine a
logfile of an aborted rpict. It states ".... rendered on foo", whereas,
thanks to mosix, it had been transparently migrated during rendering to
a different box, with happened to have a faulty RAM segment.
-- 
 pab-opto, Freiburg, Germany, www.pab-opto.de