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

[Rob Guglielmetti]

Hi Peter, didn't see your reply 'till after my latest tome.

Peter Apian-Bennewitz wrote:

> 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.

True enough.  Still on the fence over this choice.  But I think current 
funds will ultimately do the deciding for me (isn't that always the case?)

> As Schorsch pointed out, split your rtrace input vectors to two rtraces
> and half your computing time. Easy with shell or awk programming.

This is the main reason why I'm still on the fence.

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

Not at the moment.  See "funds" reference above. ;-)

> 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.

Excellent point.  I have enough trouble reigning in all the parameters 
of a given calculation and keeping everything straight.  I don't need 
the computer doing things behind my back to further confuse me! ;-)

----

      Rob Guglielmetti

e. rpg@rumblestrip.org
w. www.rumblestrip.org