nemesis wrote:
> Darren New escreveu:
>> I'm going to be getting an 8G-ram 4-core x64 machine shortly, so I 
>> look forward to trying out the new POV beta. :)
> 
> Damn lucky bastard!
> in a gentle sense...

Heh.

>> Maybe I'll even get around to finishing up the distributed render code 
>> I've written and getting it working without manual intervention on 
>> Amazon's stuff.
> 
> huh?  Distributed render code?  For povray?  on Amazon?


You're familiar with Amazon's ECC, their "elastic compute cloud"? You 
can rent their machines by the hour, fairly cheaply. (Like, $72/month 
for a one CPU machine.)

I wrote code that lets you put together a bunch of "jobs" to run in a 
local directory (which could be shell scripts that invoke POV-Ray), and 
a GUI that will push it up to Amazon's S3. You can run the "backend" 
scripts wherever you want, but it was intended you run them on Amazon's 
compute cloud. (For testing, I just use multiple processes/machines at 
home.) The back ends will pick up jobs that haven't been run, run them, 
and put the results back out in S3 for you. When it's done, all the 
machines shut down, and you have your renders.

I finished the S3 code, and the code that actually does the file 
manipulations and such, but I never wrote the code that lets you start 
it up automatically on a rented computer. You'd have to start the 
processes yourself, log in, and manually fire off the "go look for jobs 
to run" script. For one thing, while I was working on it, Amazon added a 
vital capability, which was the ability to pass something to the machine 
you just fired up without intervention, so you could launch the machine 
and as you launch it provide the login and location information it needs 
to find the jobs.

I've been testing it with a few of the scripts from the short-code 
contest from a while back.

If you want to do an animation, tho, you have to precalculate the stuff. 
It's going to parallelize everything, so it doesn't really help if 
you're doing something like simulation in POV-Ray script. Myself, I 
write code that outputs POV-Ray source, so that doesn't bother me.

-- 
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)

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