[Radiance-general] Mac OSX, xgrid and RADIANCE

[Greg Ward]

Well, I really have nothing to say about xGrid as I've never tried  
it, so let me just say it.

I think it would be nice sometimes to have something that's  
monitoring system use so it would send my jobs to the right machines  
on LBNL's render farm.  Usually, I just put the jobs there manually  
with ssh -f and coordinate with other users, but it's a bit haphazard  
and things don't usually finish together.  That said, I'm not sure  
how it works or if  it kills and restarts jobs or just stops them or  
expects small ones or what.  Many Radiance jobs of course take hours  
(or even days).

Historically, there haven't been any problems with NFS or the lock  
manager under OS X (or any BSD-derivative).  It's only Linux that's  
been finicky on that count.  Arguably, we should really replace the  
NFS lock manager with something more reliable, and we've gone back  
and forth on how to do that, but I keep hoping the problem will go  
away.  Are people still struggling with it under Linux, or is it just  
the Windows version we have to start thinking about?  Last time I  
spoke with Jack (of Visarc), I think he said it was still a problem.

-Greg

> From: Rob Guglielmetti <rpg at rumblestrip.org>
> Date: September 21, 2005 3:48:38 PM PDT
>
> Kirk Thibault wrote:
>
>> Has anyone using Mac OSX with RADIANCE tried rigging the OSX built- 
>> in  xgrid app to distribute rendering and general crunching over  
>> a  cluster of Macs?
>>
>> http://www.apple.com/server/macosx/features/xgrid.html
>>
>> Apple makes it seem so simple to gather yourself up a little   
>> supercomputer.
>>
>
> Yeah, just like the way they make their Windows support for XServe  
> look simple.  The reality is a whole lot different!  In fairness,  
> they do provide a bunch of excellent command-line tools for  
> managing the samba support in OSX Server, it's just that they make  
> it look like you never need anything but the GUI, which is pure  
> fantasy.  But this is a Radiance list so I'll stop talking about  
> Windows and XServes...
>
> Kirk, I hadn't seen this xGrid before; this is something they added  
> with 10.4 (I'm still on 10.3 and an OLD Powerbook) and it looks  
> interesting!  However, there is a long history of file locking  
> issues with Radiance and multiple machines.  The archives probably  
> contain two or three threads about this topic with respect to  
> Linux.  I'd be really interested to hear what Greg thinks of this  
> new Apple tool, and its possibilities, though.
> Rob Guglielmetti
>