Hello,

First up I'll admit I'm asking this for purely selfish reasons :-)

If anyone out there has good multi-processing skills in either NT or MacOS
would they like to try porting Povray to the BlueICE board (www.iced.com) ?

I've had a brief chat with the guys at Ice (nice people) and they said theat
they would be willing to foot the bill for the Tri-Media SDK (the processors
used on the board and which would normally cost a four figure number!) and
possibly loan the person/people a BlueICE board.

Why would anyone want to try this ? Well the BlueICE board has got 8 Philips
Tri-media processors on board all linked up in parallel to give about 6
GFLOPS of processing power :-) Now I thought to myself wouldn't that be nice
if it could be used for Povray ?

At present the board has plugins for After Effects, AVID, Boris etc and a
few commercial Raytracing packages (can't remember which at the moment) So
it should be very possible to port Povray to it.

So anyone want to have a go ? I must stress though that Ice will not
tolerate someone who just wants to mess about with the SDK cause this
venture would cost them money, so serious offers only please.

Contact me and I'll forward your details on to the relevant peoples at ICE

BTW. If you are in the UK and want to buy a BlueICE board send me a message
as we're an Ice supplier :-)

Mark

mar### [at] storagedirectcom

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Mark Smith wrote:

> Hello,
>
> First up I'll admit I'm asking this for purely selfish reasons :-)
>
> If anyone out there has good multi-processing skills in either NT or MacOS
> would they like to try porting Povray to the BlueICE board (www.iced.com) ?

Although I'm not a multiprocessing expert, I would feel up to it. I have quite
some multitasking experience and lots of asynchronous communication in them.
Besides I do not think the hard bit is the multiprocessing bit, but rather the
undertaking of porting POV (understanding the internals and splitting the
relevant parts). I expect this would be a pretty big job.Would you think one
person only can do it in a few months time ?
I personally think one person would require a good year or two for the first
port, then maybe a few months for every subsequent port.
A team of two or three might be a better idea if you want results in a nearer
future.


> I've had a brief chat with the guys at Ice (nice people) and they said theat
> they would be willing to foot the bill for the Tri-Media SDK (the processors
> used on the board and which would normally cost a four figure number!) and
> possibly loan the person/people a BlueICE board.

Nice of them.

> Why would anyone want to try this ? Well the BlueICE board has got 8 Philips
> Tri-media processors on board all linked up in parallel to give about 6
> GFLOPS of processing power :-) Now I thought to myself wouldn't that be nice
> if it could be used for Povray ?

Do you have programming skills yourself ?And do you have some time to invest in
that undertaking ?


> At present the board has plugins for After Effects, AVID, Boris etc and a
> few commercial Raytracing packages (can't remember which at the moment) So
> it should be very possible to port Povray to it.
>
> So anyone want to have a go ? I must stress though that Ice will not
> tolerate someone who just wants to mess about with the SDK cause this
> venture would cost them money, so serious offers only please.

If I was given the opportunity it would only be in my spare time - you have to
have a job that feeds don't you ?My spare time would be one to two hours daily
including weekends, excluding annual leave.
You can have a look at my CV online at :
 http://homepage.tinet.ie/~alainjoanna/Alain/e-CV.html


> Contact me and I'll forward your details on to the relevant peoples at ICE
>
> BTW. If you are in the UK and want to buy a BlueICE board send me a message
> as we're an Ice supplier :-)

I'll let you and ICE people be judge for the seriousness of my application.
The only think I really want to stress again is : "it will take a lot of time,
and more than that if it has to be done by just one person".
Also, what sort of support are ICE ready to give away to the person who will
undertake that ?
We already know :
- developpers kit
- one board on loan
We don't know :
- hot line
- spare parts or repair service
- software support
- how long are they willing to support the operation - including the loan of the
board ?

I think that is it for now.
Talk again & regards,
Alain Culos.

--
ANTI SPAM / ANTI ARROSAGE COMMERCIAL :

To answer me, please take out the Z from my address.

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Mark Smith wrote:

> Hello,

<snip>

Hi Mark,

I sent you another two messages after my first post, did you get them ? I was
wondering since I did not hear from you since.

Cheers,
Al.

(Take the Z out to reply by email)

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