Good idea!

Just my 2 cents concerning multiprocessing or clustered thingies: the
current problem (which has been the case for at least two years) is that
the fastest clusters are completely saturated by the amount of data to
move. I remember reading that being unable to even send blocks to part
of the nodes is quite common now.

The well known fact that the "usual" pvmpov has a 4s delay to wait for
stats when everything is over makes it clear that on such hardware
nobody will beat pvmegapov on skyvase, since the delay is 1s ;-)

I would suggest a reverse approach: ideally, I would like to get a 1%
accuracy on results from a *fast* cluster available when povray 3.5 is
out. This means an average timing of 100s on a 64 nodes cluster with
dual Athlon MP 1.6 GHz. Very roughly speaking, taking into account the
limited scalability of clusters, this means that Warp's 2 hours
suggestion would be perfect for this purpose. On the other hand this
means that the p200 box I'm currently using would take 2 days.
-- 

      __  __ __  __  _
|  | /  \  /  / |_  /  |/
\/\/ \__/ /_ /_ |__ \_ |\

Post a reply to this message