Hi.

Is POV available with SMP-support? I've got dual pII350 and would like
to maximize the use of the cpu's while rendering :)


-- 
// Rikard Bosnjakovic - http://a214.ryd.student.liu.se/ - ICQ: 1158217

----------------------------------------------------------------------
     Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in his shoes. That
     way, if he gets angry, he'll be a mile away - and barefoot.
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Rikard Bosnjakovic wrote:
> 
> Hi.
> 
> Is POV available with SMP-support? I've got dual pII350 and would like
> to maximize the use of the cpu's while rendering :)

POV-Ray was not written to support threading (remember, it derives from
DKB-Trace which started on the Amiga in the early '90's).  At this
point, the best you can do is to run multiple instances of POV-Ray (one
doing the top of the image and the other doing the bottom) and let the
OS handle load distribution across multiple CPU's.  This is, I'll
confess, inconvenient and inefficient in its use of memory.  PVMPOV does
some of this more transparently, but it hasn't yet been updated to
support for POV-Ray 3.1 features.

-- 
Mark Gordon
mtg### [at] povrayorg

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Mark Gordon wrote:
> 
> Rikard Bosnjakovic wrote:
> >
> > Hi.
> >
> > Is POV available with SMP-support? I've got dual pII350 and would like
> > to maximize the use of the cpu's while rendering :)
> 
> POV-Ray was not written to support threading (remember, it derives from
> DKB-Trace which started on the Amiga in the early '90's).  At this
> point, the best you can do is to run multiple instances of POV-Ray (one
> doing the top of the image and the other doing the bottom) and let the
> OS handle load distribution across multiple CPU's.  This is, I'll
> confess, inconvenient and inefficient in its use of memory.  PVMPOV does
> some of this more transparently, but it hasn't yet been updated to
> support for POV-Ray 3.1 features.
> 
> --
> Mark Gordon
> mtg### [at] povrayorg

Hi,
I just wanted to correct something, as I have just learned yesterday,
Thomas van der Veen is at the works on PVMPov based on POV3.1. There is
currently 'at least' one bug. But I guess, things will be here and there
eventually.
I just note, as this happens to appear every week, and none of those
involved cleared up by now.

Axel

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Mark Gordon wrote:

> > Is POV available with SMP-support? I've got dual pII350 and would like
> > to maximize the use of the cpu's while rendering :)
> 
> POV-Ray was not written to support threading (remember, it derives from
> DKB-Trace which started on the Amiga in the early '90's).


But I mean, today it's 1999, not 1990. A few systems has got SMP
nowadays, and it'll become more in the future. Why not start
implementing threading, right-a-way? In five years everyone has got SMP
and most raytracers has got threading. Why not implementing threading
into POV-Ray? Just because of the "DKB-trace from 1990"?


-- 
// Rikard Bosnjakovic - http://a214.ryd.student.liu.se/ - ICQ: 1158217

----------------------------------------------------------------------
     Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in his shoes. That
     way, if he gets angry, he'll be a mile away - and barefoot.
----------------------------------------------------------------------

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I said:

> PVMPOV does some of this more transparently, but it hasn't yet been updated to
> support for POV-Ray 3.1 features.

I spoke a bit too soon. :-)

There's apparently an unofficial PVMPOV based on POV-Ray 3.1e at
http://www.luga.de/~flierl/pvmpov/

Thanks to Ken for posting that link to c.g.r.r.

By the way, when I explain why POV-Ray doesn't currently support
threading, I don't want to make it sound as though the POV-Team is
opposed to having POV-Ray move in that direction.  As I've said before
on this group (within the last week!), ray tracing is an algorithm that
can take great advantage of threading.  PVMPOV in particular has been
used to showcase Beowulf clusters.  See
http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/displayStory.pl?99039.ecsuperlinux.htm
to see what IBM has done with PVMPOV.

-- 
Mark Gordon
mtg### [at] povrayorg

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Mark Gordon wrote:
> 
> I said:

> There's apparently an unofficial PVMPOV based on POV-Ray 3.1e at
> http://www.luga.de/~flierl/pvmpov/

[...]

> PVMPOV in particular has been
> used to showcase Beowulf clusters.  See
> http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/displayStory.pl?99039.ecsuperlinux.htm
> to see what IBM has done with PVMPOV.

I know about that, because we built a Beowulf-cluster at school and
tried PVMPOV :)   But that box is there, and here I've got SMP which I
want to utilize.

But I'll check around PVMPOV once again and see if I can hack around
with it :)

-- 
// Rikard Bosnjakovic - http://a214.ryd.student.liu.se/ - ICQ: 1158217

----------------------------------------------------------------------
     Before you criticize someone, walk a mile in his shoes. That
     way, if he gets angry, he'll be a mile away - and barefoot.
----------------------------------------------------------------------

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There was a huge thread on this news server about multithreaded POV about
6 - 8 months ago.  You should probably check programming or general news
groups.

Jim



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

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Rikard Bosnjakovic wrote:
> 
> Mark Gordon wrote:
> >
> > I said:
> 
> > There's apparently an unofficial PVMPOV based on POV-Ray 3.1e at
> > http://www.luga.de/~flierl/pvmpov/
> 
> [...]
> 
> > PVMPOV in particular has been
> > used to showcase Beowulf clusters.  See
> > http://www.infoworld.com/cgi-bin/displayStory.pl?99039.ecsuperlinux.htm
> > to see what IBM has done with PVMPOV.
> 
> I know about that, because we built a Beowulf-cluster at school and
> tried PVMPOV :)   But that box is there, and here I've got SMP which I
> want to utilize.
> 
> But I'll check around PVMPOV once again and see if I can hack around
> with it :)

I run PVMPOV on my SMP-box at home, and get quite a good speedup, I
haven't checked how large... I just spec. that I want PVMPOV to use >= 2
processes and it utilize my box 100%, so you shouldn't have any problems
with it.

/Peter Toneby

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