Hello,

I want to do a demo for linux SMP-capabilities on a highend SMP-box with
povray.

Therefor I have a couple of questions:

- does povray support multithreading, or do I still have to split the
image into sepate processes.

- is there a decent frontend to split up the task for a SMP-box ?

- I read there is an unofficial port of 3.1a. Is it worth trying that
instead of the official version, i.E. do I get any benefit on a
SMP-machine? Does it compile/work with Linux 2.2?

- Does anybody know other programs to *visualize* SMP on Linux?

thanks for your time, juergen

PS: Please CC to my mail-address as this news-server is hard to reach
sometimes.

-- 
Juergen Schmidt   Redakteur/editor  c't magazin
Verlag Heinz Heise GmbH & Co KG, Helstorferstr. 7, D-30625 Hannover
EMail: ju### [at] ctheisede - Tel.: +49 511 5352 300 - FAX: +49 511 5352 417

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Juergen Schmidt wrote:
> 
> Hello,
> 
> I want to do a demo for linux SMP-capabilities on a highend SMP-box with
> povray.
> 
> Therefor I have a couple of questions:
> 
> - does povray support multithreading, or do I still have to split the
> image into sepate processes.
> 
> - is there a decent frontend to split up the task for a SMP-box ?
> 
> - I read there is an unofficial port of 3.1a. Is it worth trying that
> instead of the official version, i.E. do I get any benefit on a
> SMP-machine? Does it compile/work with Linux 2.2?
> 
> - Does anybody know other programs to *visualize* SMP on Linux?
> 
> thanks for your time, juergen
> 
> PS: Please CC to my mail-address as this news-server is hard to reach
> sometimes.
> 
> --
> Juergen Schmidt   Redakteur/editor  c't magazin
> Verlag Heinz Heise GmbH & Co KG, Helstorferstr. 7, D-30625 Hannover
> EMail: ju### [at] ctheisede - Tel.: +49 511 5352 300 - FAX: +49 511 5352 417

I am still trying to put an answer together for the VFAQ because multi
processor related questions about povray appeared a lot in the last
time. 

Apparently there exist two ways to use PovRay in a UNIX client-server
environment. 

1. PVWPov (
http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Lab/6386/pvmpov/index.html )
This work with the 3.0 version of povray.

2. distpov The URL of this one is down in the moment. I haven't got the
email of its author but the soul of our Newsgroup (Ken that's you!!!)
may provide to you.


If I'am right PVMPov has been used during the last WDR Computernacht on
the Linux Cluster to show its efficiency 

 http://www.heise.de/ix/artikel/1999/01/010/default.shtml :-)

One of the participants has been Thomas Wilhalm of the Uni Konstanz who
posts quite often in this groups!

I hope this has been of any help for you,


Marc
-- 
Marc Schimmler

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Marc Schimmler wrote:


> 2. distpov The URL of this one is down in the moment. I haven't got the
> email of its author but the soul of our Newsgroup (Ken that's you!!!)
> may provide to you.

and### [at] cusumistacuk 

--
Ken Tyler

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Soul of the Newsgroup wrote:
> 
> Marc Schimmler wrote:
> 
> > 2. distpov The URL of this one is down in the moment. I haven't got the
> > email of its author but the soul of our Newsgroup (Ken that's you!!!)
> > may provide to you.
> 
> and### [at] cusumistacuk
> 
> --
> Ken Tyler

Keep it!!!

It really looks nice! :-)


Marc
-- 
Marc Schimmler

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Perhaps this URL ( http://www.uni-paderborn.de/cs/heiss/linux/cluster/ )
helps.
That's the Software used at the last WDR-Computernacht.
Don't know if it works.
Jo

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Marc Schimmler <sch### [at] icauni-stuttgartde> writes:

> Juergen Schmidt wrote:
> > 
> > I want to do a demo for linux SMP-capabilities on a highend SMP-box with
> > povray.
> > 
> > Therefor I have a couple of questions:
> > 
> > - does povray support multithreading, or do I still have to split the
> > image into sepate processes.
> > 
> > - is there a decent frontend to split up the task for a SMP-box ?
> > 
> > - I read there is an unofficial port of 3.1a. Is it worth trying that
> > instead of the official version, i.E. do I get any benefit on a
> > SMP-machine? Does it compile/work with Linux 2.2?
[...]
> 
> 1. PVWPov (
> http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Lab/6386/pvmpov/index.html )
> This work with the 3.0 version of povray.
[...]
> 
> If I'am right PVMPov has been used during the last WDR Computernacht on
> the Linux Cluster to show its efficiency 
> 
>  http://www.heise.de/ix/artikel/1999/01/010/default.shtml :-)
> 
> One of the participants has been Thomas Wilhalm of the Uni Konstanz who
> posts quite often in this groups!

I wasn't involved in setting up the version of POV-Ray that was used at
the WDR Computernacht -- I have just used the installed software. As
far as I know, they used a shell script to distribute the rendering. At
the cluster event, the rendered scenes were films. Each frame of a film
was considered as a separate job. The jobs were then distributed using
LIST-SCHEDULING: When a machine becomes idle, it gets the next job from
a given list.

PVMPov is more fine-grained. It is also useful to render a single image
on a multi-processor machine or several machines. The underlying software
is PVM. It provides a common interface to a "parallel virtual machine".
That means, that it is easily possible to use different types of computers
as one big computer.

PVMPov splits the image in several small pieces. A central server program
starts a client task on every virtual machine. The parts of the image are
then assigned to the client tasks.

Let me describe a concrete scenario: Let's assume you have a computer with
4 processors. If you start PVMPov with this information, then 4 tasks are
started where every task parses the scene and renders the parts of the
image as told by the server program. 

As far as I know, there is still a problem with halos. PVMPov doesn't
render them correctly. I haven't heard so far about a new version of PVMPov
that includes the changes of POV-Ray 3.1. 

POV-Ray 3.1 introduces a lot of helpful and nice features (mainly
file i/o, macros, and media replacing and extending halos). It does
however not help you with multi-processor machines.

I have no experience with PVMPov on Linux, but I have used PVM-Pov with
Sun Solaris. I have tried to compile PVM with Windows, but failed.
The current distribution of Linux by SuSE contains compiled binaries of
PVM-Pov and PVM.

Feel free to ask me here or per PM.

Thomas

-- 
http://www.fmi.uni-konstanz.de/~willhalm

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