Tek wrote:
> 
> That's true if I follow the philosophy of running seperate instances of pov on
> seperate machines, but surely it would be possible to modify POV to run in some
> multi-threaded configuration (say with each ray on a seperate thread) which
> could then be farmed out to the different processors?
> 
> Has anyone attempted such a thing? Is there software/OS's available that will
> let a network of PCs emulate a multi-processor system? I confess I've never
> programmed anything like that and I've never looked at POV's source, so I'd be
> very curious to know how difficult it would be to do something like that.

This has been discussed a lot already - first of all a use of 
multithreading inside POV-Ray will not have any significant advantage 
for distributed renders on a cluster of several machines - even if you 
use a system emulating a single multiprocessor machine the communication 
overhead would require a completely different design than on a true SMP 
machine (and you would have the same trouble with techniques that are 
difficult to parallelize as with an external implementation).

But much more important is that there is no way to implement 
multithreading in a portable manner - not even for the three 'official' 
platforms.  So if you want to attempt implementing such a system (which 
would be pretty hard on the current POV-Ray source anyway) you would 
have to implement several platform specific variants.

-- 
Christoph Hormann
http://www.tu-bs.de/~y0013390/

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