Megapov-XRS: Extreme Render Server
George Pantazopoulos 2004,2006
http://www.gammaburst.net
XRS version 2.x.x

Megapov-XRS adds distributed rendering capability to MegaPOV.

Download:
---------
http://www.gammaburst.net/xrs/

Benefits:
---------

- Any number of computers anywhere in the world can join forces to
accelerate
  a MegaPOV render.

- For scenes with high parse or photon times, Megapov-XRS can be faster
  than simple script-driven distributed render farms. This is because such
  expensive scene initializations are done only once on each server, no
matter
  how many tiles are rendered. A render job can be divided into more tiles
  than there are CPUs with little additional overhead, allowing better load
  balancing and quicker previews.

- Responsive; Existing render jobs can be quickly interrupted at any time
  to start a new render. Great for doing accelerated test renders.

- Simple XML-RPC interface allows custom render clients to be written
  in any language, including C++ and Python.

Supported platforms:
--------------------

The Server has been built and tested on Cygwin and 32-bit Linux (Fedora).

The Python-based Client has been built and tested on Win32, Cygwin, and
Linux
PyGtk is required. For Win32: http://www.pcpm.ucl.ac.be/~gustin/win32_ports/

Security concerns:
------------------

While Megapov-XRS does not contain security features such as authentication,
a secure connection can readily be established (including through firewalls)
through the use of ssh and its port tunneling features.

The use of ssh port forwarding is recommended when doing internet renders.


Thanks:
-------

Anton Dedov for his most excellent XML-RPC library, libiqxmlrpc
http://libiqxmlrpc.sourceforge.net

Jaime Vives Piqueres for being my guinea pig :)
http://www.ignorancia.org/

Wolfgang Wieser for his feedback and offer of webspace
http://www.cip.physik.uni-muenchen.de/~wwieser/

Python for making the pyxrsclient tons of fun to develop. Python rocks!
http://www.python.org

Nicholas Calimet for the neat GNU Autotools-based megapov build system

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