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

[Gregory J. Ward]

Hi Lars,

Over a year ago, there was quite a bit of talk on the dev list about 
supporting ambient value sharing through Samba or coming up with some 
workaround for busted NFS lock managers, but nothing was ever done 
about it.  People on this list can tell you better than I what versions 
of Linux or NFS you need to look out for.  In general, I think OS X and 
FreeBSD are solid with respect to NFS file locking.  Solaris might be 
good as well.

-Greg

> From: "Lars O. Grobe" <grobe at gmx.net>
> Date: February 2, 2005 7:40:05 AM PST
>
> 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.