[Radiance-general] Radiance Render Server

[Jeffrey McGrew]

> if you want my arogant two-cent thoughts after some years of IT life: 
> the only reason for doing it by email is what the name of your domain 
> says: becausewecan.org

I love the input, that's why I posted it out to the list! ;-)

>   1. You'll be moving a couple of dozen megabytes for any serious work,
>      email gateways typically block very large emails, not to mention
>      folks with slow links. A sysadmin may rip out vital parts out of
>      someone using the system mail spool area as intermediate
>      octree/image storage.  ftp/http/scp is just better by design for
>      large volume

A: See No. 3 below

>   2. the server has to set up everything the specific job needs
>      (version of binaries, environment variables, libraries, ...),
>      which needs a bit of care with any method

A: I was thinking that this would be a part of the solution, a .zip or 
.tar file is sent to the 'RRS' (thanks for that) and then it's 
unpacked, and any user-defined .cal's and such will be included within 
that archive. The basic assumption is that everyone using this (which 
would be my company, which right now consists of me ;-) ) would be on 
the same page, Radiance-wise.

>   3. web-based leaps to mind before email does (the latter probably
>      never leaps anyway...). Marc Fontoynont's group sat up something
>      for their Genelux program long ago (sorry, don't have any further
>      references to it)

Web stuff and FTP are all well and good, and a great way to go, if I 
want to pay extra for a static IP and the task of managing my own 
server. I'm mobile, working from a laptop, and while I can run stuff 
under Cygwin (and do) it would be cooler/better/more feasible to have 
the RRS do this while I'm working on something else and/or in transit.

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

I've got a flowchart that I worked out, that makes it e-mail back 
error messages if something is left out or if there is an error.

>   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

Two things: When rendering, I would like to work on my computer for 
other things too, and those other things require Windows. Currently I 
run Cygwin on my laptop, and use Radiance within there. This is 
working well, but I would love to be able to hand these jobs off to a 
faster computer, and a desktop/server gives a lot more bang for the 
buck than a laptop in raw processor speed. It would also allow for the 
RRS to run whatever OS is best on whatever hardware I can afford, and 
then I can move the RRS to whatever platform I need, or in the future 
to a cluster...

Second is that it would be cool. No, Seriously. I work in Revit, dump 
my models to AutoCAD, tweak layers and such, export to Radiance, send 
the job off, and then keep working in Revit while my job 'bakes' on 
the RRS and is sent back to me when done. How cool would that be? My 
little RRS working away, day and night... Makes animations much more 
feasible too!

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

This would primarily be for my own use, so I'm gonna start out small.

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

Yeah, if I go with a web-thing it would probably be Apache on 
Mandrake, using Python (just because it's what I'm a little familiar 
with) or something.

Thanks again, keep it coming!

Jeffrey McGrew