Darren New wrote:
> SAMBA *is* client-server over tcp/ip. So ... what do you *actually* need?

There isn't a rats chance in hell I am exposing samba or windows fileshares
to the internet. Security, network overhead and potential file locking
issues kill this option stone dead (and thats before you think about the
limitations it imposes on the whole process)

Most of what I would like isn't exactly hard to do, the biggest problem is
how povray renders a tile. 

IMO if its possible to render a portion of an image, and that portion is not
100% identical to the same portion when rendered as part of a whole image.
Its Pov thats needs fixing.

Anyway, since you asked - I want a server to accept rendering jobs. clients
to talk to server and request parts of current job, said parts are then
sent back to server on completion.

job submission is seperate from the server.

Server tracks allotted jobs and will always aim to maintain 100% client
usage. So, when a job is 90% complete, the same part may be passed to
several clients (that would oitherwise be idle) . This will ensure that the
overall job progress does not depend on a couple of slow clients that were
unlucky enough to get the hardest tiles. Clients will check back with
server during the render to see if the part they are working on is still
required.

Server builds profiles of clients and will try to pass faster/smaller tiles
to slower clients (say, tiles from the outside of an image). Server also
builds profile of job, so when a tile is returned it will score its
neighbours and attempt to build a complexity map of the image (or just play
minesweeper)


Add the ability for servers can talk to and pass jobs to other servers, a
central server database, and clients that can share common job (such as
image maps) amongs themselves and we can have a massive render farm that
anybody can donate cpu cycles to and benifit from.  
-- 
Rick

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