[Radiance-general] Radiance Render Server

[Georg Mischler]

Peter Apian-Bennewitz wrote:

> Jeffrey McGrew wrote:
>
> >
> > OK, so I've got this idea to make a Radiance Render server.
>
>    3. web-based leaps to mind before email does (the latter probably
>       never leaps anyway...).


Dont ask me why I didn't mention this an hour ago.

Probably because I'm still more thinking of it as a project
than a product. But I've been working on a web based online
version of Rayfront for quite a while now. It's in beta, and
the payment infrastructure is currently being integrated.

The people who commissioned this will offer it as a service,
or sell it as a "render appliance". You can buy a box to be
installed in a rack in your server room, and all you need
to access it for running simulations is a web browser with
the flash plugin.


>    4. how do your users pack their jobs ? zip,tar ? How do they verify
>       they have everything included ?

Upload a DXF file, compressed with zip or gzip if it
gets too large otherwise. Other types of upload will be
easy to add if there's a real need.


>    5. why setting up a server anyway? For an occasoanl user the various
>       boot-radiance-from-cd concepts are probably much quicker (right on
>       their machine), for bulk processing a render farm with file
>       sharing is approx 3 orders of magnitude faster and easier to manage

How about a render farm in behind a server based interface?
Those boot-radiance-from-cd concepts also don't come with
tools for material assignment and simulation control


>    6. for public usage the server would have to implement some resource
>       management, otherwise any job may block the resources for an
>       unpredictable time

The available CPUs need to be adequate for the expecded
load. In an in-house situation, you just file jobs into a
queue. On a commercial service you can buy "render points",
some of which get eaten up by each simulation you run.
Other than that you have user and group management, so that
several people from the same organisation can run their jobs
and it all gets billed together.


> if you still want to go and dig in (good!), my personal recommendation
> would be PHP scripts on a webserver (very preferably Apache).

Buzzword alarm:
The online version of Rayfront is a multi-tier solution.
It uses the Python-based web application server Zope running
behind Apache, with XML-RPC connections to the Flash client and
to the simulation backend.


-schorsch

-- 
Georg Mischler  --  simulations developer  --  schorsch at schorsch com
+schorsch.com+  --  lighting design tools  --  http://www.schorsch.com/