Hi Wolfgang!

> Two comments: 
> 
> (1) Did I miss anything or is there no client authentication?
>     Since the only "render farm" I could use is available to more people 
>     than me alone, I'd never use something which does not at least have 
>     some challenge-response auth. 
>

       You are certainly right to bring up this point, and I have 
considered it as well. However, ssh already does this better than 
anything I could code up, so I felt I shouldn't try reinventing the wheel.

       I regurlaly run a MegapovXRS server on a remote machine, which I 
connect to by using ssh port forwarding. For the sake of example, say 
the remote (Server) machine is 'caboose' and the local (client) machine 
is 'megatron', and MegapovXRS listens on port 9000. I would start the 
server on caboose with "ssh -L 9123:localhost:9000 megapovXRS". This 
opens a secure connection to the server, which is reachable by 
connecting to megatron:9123. There is no need for any ports to be opened 
on caboose besides the ssh port (22).



> (2) In case we have 20 computers for a render task and parsing + photons 
>     (only?) takes 5% of total time, then the complete overhead is 100%, i.e. 
>     we spend twice as much CPU*computers as necessary. 
>     Overcoming this by having the client doing the parsing and send the 
>     internal state to the server, however, is probably really hard to do. 
>     This is IMO only a problem when rendering animations (per-frame rendering 
>     time normally relatively short) or scenes which need a lot of parsing. 
> 
> Wolfgang
> 

        Say we have 20 computers, and each task takes 100 minutes total 
(per computer). 5 percent parse overhead means 5 minutes per computer is 
spent parsing, and the remaining 95 rendering. That means that (20 cpus 
* 5 minutes parsing/cpu = 100 ) cpu-minutes are spent parsing and (20 
cpus * 95 minutes rendering/cpu = 1900 ) cpu-minutes are spent 
rendering. So the complete overhead is 100 cpu-minutes out of the 2000 
total, which is still 5%, not 100%. Remember, my patch only parses once 
per machine, not once per tile :)

Also, we have a great program called RendView for anims, I'm aiming this 
   program at accelerating high-quality stills :)

Thanks for your comments!
George




-- 
-------------------------
George Pantazopoulos
http://www.gammaburst.net

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