Thanks for the fast reply.  

I've started to think about what would be needed to create a
multi-threaded client-server version of POV-Ray.  I've made a few phone
calls and talked it over with some friends who believe that number
crunching is a valid past-time.  Response has been good.  I'll have
access to a Sun Ultra Enterprise E450 server for some of this but will
probably use a Sun Ultra 2300 and a SparcStation 20 longterm.  I am
wondering how this project should shape up and will draw up a timeline,
a budget, a team and some initial thoughts about the deliverables.  The
first stage will be discovery and that entails the source code as it
stands today.  Once a few people are intimate with the source and its
issues, the next stage would be to see if its possible to build a
client-server application shell around it that farms out image component
responsibilites to clients.  While a client-server wrapper is a bit of a
hack it is a reasonable starting point.  A full rewrite of the code
would be a very daunting task but the time has come, I unilaterally
think, to either take this application to the next level or to forever
leave it as a single-threaded single machine application.  I have no
intent on being a criticizer of what POV-Ray is today, I stand and
salute the authors for an excellent product.  I merely think that some
form of investigation into a viable client-server multi-threaded edition
may be prudent at this time.

Dennis Clarke
http://www.interlog.com/~dclarke/povray/povray.html

ps: I see no need to keep POV-Ray portable across "so many platforms". 
It may be wise to drop support on those systems that do not support
multi-threaded operating systems.  Merely a thought.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Mark Gordon wrote:
> 
> I'm getting access to a Sun box, so the SunOS POV-Ray should be updated
> from 3.02 in the near future.  Hard to tell at this point what the
> performance will be like, but it's not going to be any more threaded
> than any of the other versions (i.e. not at all).  It's my feeling that
> it's not practical (without major rewrite, increase in burden of
> maintenance) to add support for threading to the official POV-Ray at
> this point, due largely to the need to keep the rendering engine
> portable across so many platforms.
> 
> As for Dennis' efforts to support a threaded POV-Ray: be my guest.  If
> it will require changes to files outside the unix directory in the
> source tree, it probably can't be incorporated into an official version,
> but I have no problems with platform-specific enhancements that boost
> performance on some platforms (e.g. PVMPOV) as long as they abide by the
> license.  In theory, ray tracing should thread wonderfully, and users of
> SMP machines could see a great deal of benefit.
> 
> --
> Mark Gordon
> mtg### [at] povrayorg

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