In article <3d9effab$1@news.povray.org> , "Timothy R. Cook" 
<tim### [at] scifi-fantasycom> wrote:

> Has anybody ever tried compiling POV to run on, say, a Cray or

A Cray, which it over ten years outdated, will not perform much better than
your old 486.  It is designed to process vectors* in order to process
matrices and similar structures which appear i.e. in weather forecasting.
If the data is not linear it will not perform well at all (in a sense it is
not an efficient general purpose computer).

> other really high-end supercomputer?  If so, how complex of a
> scene could be rendered in a space of 24 hours, or a week, or
> similar times used for complex scenes on PCs?

No, all systems you consider "supercomputer" are just massive parallel
systems and most (but not all) are build out of regular high-end processors
(DEC Alpha, SGI MIPS, IBM Power).  The other systems around are those from
NEC and Hitachi, which are based on vector processors.  Oh, and then there
is of course the Sun Sparc, which is frequently found in database servers of
large companies.  But no matter what processor these systems are based on,
they are all massive parallel systems, usually with distributed (and locally
shared) memory subsystems.  A good, but as usual not current (because data
in the list is on average six month old) overview can be found at
<http://www.top500.org/list/2002/06/>

The "problems" remain the same as for building your own local cluster.  The
distribution of global data (i.e. radiosity).  Of course, you can run
POV-Ray on such systems, but they won't change the limitations.


    Thorsten


* A "vector" in this context means one with about a few hundred to a few
thousand components.


____________________________________________________
Thorsten Froehlich, Duisburg, Germany
e-mail: tho### [at] trfde

Visit POV-Ray on the web: http://mac.povray.org

Post a reply to this message