[Radiance-general] sharing indirect values for parallel processing?

[Lars O. Grobe]

Hi!

I am going to start some large renderings during the next weeks, and I 
would like to have a little park of rendering machines available by the 
time. Now, parallel processing has been a topic here for some time, and 
I am wondering about the changes in the recent developments.

I know there is the new -N switch of rad, which will distribute 
renderings to multiple processes, right? So this seams to be the 
frontend to use, maybe better than starting all the rpict & Co.s 
manually. What I would really like to know what file sharing mechanism 
should I use for indirect values? It used to be nfs, and the 
documentation in the radiance distribution still reflects how to use 
nfs and lcking to share data between processes. Would the same be 
possible e.g. with samba? I am asking because I have a working samba 3 
server available, offering enough space and lots of bandwidth. If samba 
is not supported, I could still install a nfs server, however, I 
remember some trouble with different nfs-locking mechanisms and the 
os-dependance of nfs implementations (we use OS X, Linux and Solaris 
here...;-).

So if there is any news about this topic, maybe some reports from 
people who use radiance in parallel environments, it would be of great 
help.

TIA+CU, Lars.