Sven Littkowski escribió:
 > YES!!! That would be fine! In addition, you would be free to use the 
items inside there for your own scenes, I do not mind.
 >
 > Specs:
 > - Intel Pentium DualCore 3.06 GH CPU
 > - 2,048 MB RAM (2 GB RAM)
 > - Scene File Output Resolution: 3,200 x 2,400 pixels

My computer is an AMD Dual Core 4200+ 2.20GHz, 2GB of RAM. So I guess 
it's slower... And I think I have higher chance of a power outage than you.

 > Do you know about "Render Farm" software?

*I have a renderfarm* currently hosted on IMP (Internet Movie Project) 
server. There's somebody attached with some 8-core machines! Although he 
has some powerful Macs, and I never got round to compiling POV-Ray (with 
my patches) for Mac, so there's some unused power.

http://impfarm.imp.org/boinc/hosts_user.php?userid=36

One problem is that photon mapping *can't* be distributed, in the sense 
that we can't lower the time it takes by throwing more computers into 
it. At least not without modifying POV source in areas I wouldn't dare 
touch. Although, even if it was possible, it would need a lot of network 
bandwidth for all computers to exchange the parts of the photon map they 
computed, before doing the render...

So, each computer would need to compute the photon map completely. And 
since it can't be resumed, that may be a problem for some users who 
wouldn't keep their computers running for 6 days...

<PovAddict> somebody on povray newsgroups has a scene that takes 6 days 
to do a pre-computation that cannot be resumed, I'm wondering if it 
would be acceptable for imp@home to have WUs that spend 6 days computing 
without being able to checkpoint at all
<KathrynM> are you crazy?
<PovAddict> :D
<Rookie_69> That's why he comes here.

Hmm yeah it may be a problem.

And then there is the RAM usage. POV-Ray keeps the whole photon map 
loaded in RAM. There are sub-2GB machines that won't be able to 
participate. Plus, are you sure exactly how much memory the scene will 
use? I think that's impossible to know without computing the whole 
photon map and checking the statistics at the end of the render.

PS: I tried to email you, removing the obvious anti-spam measures, but 
it immediately bounced back, saying "invalid address".

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