[Radiance-general] Mac OSX, xgrid and RADIANCE

[Thomas Bleicher]

On 22.09.2005, at 00:48, Rob Guglielmetti wrote:

> 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

[...]

> 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!

You can download xGrid for 10.3 as well (accordign to the PDF  
available on
the page above - nice and short intro).

> However, there is a long history of file locking issues with  
> Radiance and multiple machines.

Reading the man-page for xgrid I think file locking of the amb-file  
would
be the only problem as the controller process _copyies_ the whole  
working
directory to the clients.

Everything else could be as simple as this example (from the man-page):

 > Submit myscript with the files in the input directory.  Send email to
 > somebody at apple.com on every job state change. Then retrieve the  
results
 > and save the stdout and stderr streams in files instead of  
printing them
 > out to the terminal and save the output files in the specified  
directory.
 > Finally delete the job:
 >
 >     $ xgrid -job submit -in ~/data/working -email somebody at apple.com
 >     myscript param1 param2
 >     { jobIdentifier = 27; }
 >     $ xgrid -job results -id 27 -so job.out -se job.err -out job- 
outdir
 >     $ xgrid -job delete -id 27

Seems like no changes to the code are necessary. It would be nice
if someone with a flock of Macs at his/her disposition could test
this sometimes ...


As a related note on OS X 10.4:

I'm trying to get a bit of performance from my G5 iMac. Compiling the
Radiance source is a matter of minutes. But when I try Mark's benchmarks
(http://mark.technolope.org/pages/rad_bench.html) the rpict time is  
worse
than his results for an 1.6 GHz P4-M.

I thought a 2 GHz PowerPC would perform much better than that. I have
only tested a few compiler optimizations so far but I don't think they
will change that much any more. Apple ships gcc 4.0 as default compiler
for 10.4. Could this be the reason?

What performance should I expect from the G5?


Thomas