I'm currently working on a way to use the many machines at work to
render over automatically, with out having to setup things like pvm....

So if written a perl script to control some clients.

It uses ssh for the transport method.
Tar+gzip to have an archive to send over to the clients, and to get back
the files/ images

screen - to monitor the clients.

To do thou:
	allow clients to go away and come back.
	if a client is given a job, and it stops/ never comes back, to recover
and re-do that job
	allow the rendeing to stop half way and continue from there.

So is this something that people are interested in???

TO give you an idea I did an anim last night 320x240 x140 frames with aa
over 4 machines and it took 88 mins... The four pcs are 
PII - 400
PII - 333
PIII - 650
Pentium - 200

Cheers
Fran

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On Thu, 19 Oct 2000 03:51:40 +0000, Fran Firman <ffi### [at] emailcom>
wrote:

>I'm currently working on a way to use the many machines at work to
>render over automatically, with out having to setup things like pvm....

>So if written a perl script to control some clients.

<snip>

>So is this something that people are interested in???

You might as well post it because you've already made it :) I don't
know if many people will use it, it depends on whether they want to
and can install pvm, as there is a pvm version of MegaPOV already.


Peter Popov ICQ : 15002700
Personal e-mail : pet### [at] usanet
TAG      e-mail : pet### [at] tagpovrayorg

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Speeedy Dan wrote:
> 
> yes, I guess I'd be very interested. Just started out with POVRay a couple a
> months ago, but I'm genuinly interested and love exploring all the
> possibilities. I'm working with ProEngineer for a living so I use that
> primarily to generate my 3D-models. Love the look on my colleagues faces
> when I created another POVRay miracle. It would be really cool to do a nice
> little movie.
> Got a Celly566@850 and a PII-450 so it would be great if I could distribute
> tasx between the two of them.
> 
> --
> 
> ---
> 
> Greetz,
> 
> Speedy Dan
> 
> Common sense was chasing me,
>                   fortunately I was quicker..........
> 

I have posted the code into povray.binaries.utilities group.

Now at the moment the machines need ssh on the clients and servers to
work.
I'm working on a method to use netcat on the unix clients/servers, so
that ssh doesn't have to be on the machines, and the user doesn't need
accounts on the machines...

This was it would be easier for someone (Not me 8-) to create a client
for Mac or Windows. And with a change to the server, to allow tagging of
the clients machines OS, could send different packages to the clients.
Or set up the packages with portable stuff and have the necessary
binaries ready on the clients first.

Another area I could see this system working for is, 
	encoding mp3's (1 per machine)
	creating mpeg animations (if you know of a way of patching separate
mpegs together without having to re-calculate the whole thing).
	polling many routers, with different clients, and getting back the
results for alarming against.

The sorts of things this could be used for is limitless (Well maybe not
- but a lot). And it will be easier to install than mosix.. 8-)

For me I want to get it so I can use windows machines, as at work we
have about 70 PII 450's running windows 95 - all doing nothing for 18
hours a day.

Cheers 
Fran

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