[Radiance-general] IBM pSeries 575

[Lars O. Grobe]

Hi Randolph,

the Power architecture is well supported, both by Linux (e.g. Debian) 
and IBM's propietary systems. Radiance has been developed on a similar 
architecture (Power G4,G5) over the years, it is happy with 
Little/Big-endianess, so I would not expect problems.

I do not know how the virtualization is solved, probably you can get 
either one node with many available cores or many separate cores. Both 
is fine, as Radiance supports forking processes on one node (-N NCPUs) 
as well as distributing among machines (using e.g. ssh and shared 
ambient files). I have used ranimate in the past for cluster rendering 
(without ssh), which may be a possible (but not required) approach here:

http://larsgrobe.de/content/distributed-rendering-ranimate

Cheers, Lars.
> It runs Unix, so I expect Radiance will compile and run on it, but it 
> uses IBM POWER5+ processors, rather than x86s, so there may be some 
> surprises.
>
> Do you know what operating system the system administrators are 
> using?  According to IBM, administrators have a choice of AIX, Red Hat 
> Linux, and SUSE Linux, or possibly all three in a virtualization mode.
>
> Ref: 
> http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/power/hardware/systemp/highend/575/index.html 
>