[Radiance-general] multi-processing on SGI Onyx

[Thomas Seebohm]

Here is an error message that appears when I am running Radiance on
processors shared with other unix processes on our 16 processor SGI Onyx:

"rpict inconsistency
address not found in avlemi
rpiece error reading from rpict"

When this message appears one of the squares in the images is not rendered. If
there are more such messages, more than one square is not rendered.
Presumably, the processor responsible was not able to contribute its  share of
the rendering because of a conflict with another process sharing the same
processor. To avoid this problem I usually run the "top" command to see how
many processors are currently running unix processes and then I choose a
number of processors for my rpiece script that will be less than the number of
unused processors. I wonder if someone has a more detailed explanation of the
error and if there are ways to avoid the error when the processors share
processes other than Radiance.

Thomas