On 8/2/19 2:19 PM, Steve Anger wrote:
> I'm looking for some advise from anyone who has experience rendering long
> animations to virtual cloud servers. Any feedback on what services have given
> the best price/performance with POV-Ray (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, etc). Are
> there any scripts available to automatically assign portions of the task to
> cloud servers or have you found it simpler to just split the task between
> servers manually.
> 

Jakob Flierl (Koppi on newsgroups) posted a pointer to:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PyRjMQ0-Xik

in the thread:

http://news.povray.org/povray.general/thread/%3Cweb.57190929c0fb63c55802fb0%40news.povray.org%3E/?mtop=407886

where he posted additional information such as a link to some set up 
scripts at :

https://github.com/bullet-physics-playground/bpp/issues/8


There have been other posts about cloud rendering - including an example 
of an implementation by AWS folks for some feature using POV-Ray as the 
vehicle, but I didn't quickly find those links in my notes. A POV-Ray 
site search on cloud would likely would turn most of those up.

If you make progress, I'm interested in what you find. Such work is 
still on my, try-it-someday list. My current interest is mostly with 
running the thousands of test cases I've accumulated over the past few 
years.

Years back, cost wise, I looked at AWS and thought their bid for free 
time mode would be cheaper than having a second local machine or two 
onto which to offload work given bid history at the time. I have though, 
complications in sometimes wanting machines not running other things for 
performance comparison work(1). Dedicated machines looked more expensive.

I have, off and on, been working on creating virtual machines local to 
my machine to learn. It looks like the kvm, qemu, libvirt stuff can 
emulate to the cpu type level in addition to OS images. Are there 
virtual hardware counters and such I could use to measure performance in 
a repeatable, dedicated machine way. This would make a cloud solution 
more attractive to me. Are such virtual CPUs affected by other VMs 
running on the same real machine - I don't know. My VM play is still 
very basic.

Bill P.

(1) My image comparison test cases capture and compare time for gross 
ideas of performance change. These times are not reliable unless the 
machine is doing nothing but a chain of single, one threaded render 
tests, at a time.

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