Hi all-

This is an aside question....what is the hardware you run Povray on? 
Anyone running it on a Cray? Or a chip? I've got Povray running on a 
Sony PS2 running Linux....doing the benchmark.pov file took more than 
two weeks before it crashed.

Just curious,

Ron

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> I've got Povray running on a 
> Sony PS2 running Linux....doing the benchmark.pov file took more than 
> two weeks before it crashed.

	Ooops  :-)

	Considering how cheap is a relatively fast PC hardware nowadays,
I would strongly recommand to forget the PS2...  For instance, benchmark.ini
runs (succesfully) in about 35 minutes on an simple Athlon XP 2400+ or an
Intel P4 2.6 GHz.  Going to a 64-bit compile (on Athlon64/Opteron machine)
is also known to give an interesting speedup (compared to the 32-bit version
ran on the same machine) but that's a different budget.

	I never tried POV on a Cray and I won't.  Crays are interesting only
for highly parallelized/vectorized jobs (even that is changing).  POV-Ray is
not yet parallalized as of version 3.6 (unofficial MPI/PVM patches for 3.5
introduce some severe limitations or even problems).

	You should probably also forget about "older" architectures such as
SGI Mips or Sun Sparc.  The former were designed for CAD, the second IIRC
were most suited as servers.  None are good with floating-point intensive
applications.

	DEC (now Compaq now HP) could be worth a try; at least an EV6
machine was, back in 2000, much faster than a recent PC.  But it's far
too expensive IMO.

	Honestly, prefer a good PC or Mac for running POV.  It's not
by chance there is official support for these architectures.

	- NC

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> Going to a 64-bit compile (on Athlon64/Opteron machine)
> is also known to give an interesting speedup (compared to the 32-bit 
> version ran on the same machine)

	Since I have now access to a dual Opteron machine, here are some
timings with POV-Ray 3.6.1 for Unix to support the above statement:

Machine specs:
   CPU: (dual) AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 246  (2 GHz)  with 8 GB RAM
   OS : Tao Linux (based on RedHat Enterprise Linux 3) kernel 2.4.21-15.0.3.TLsatasmp
   CXX: gcc-3.4.1 (user-installed)

Compiling specs:
   distro: source distribution of povray-3.6.1 for Unix
   flags : detected by configure, i.e.
     -pipe -Wno-multichar -O3 -msse -mfpmath=sse -msse2 -march=k8 -mtune=k8
     -minline-all-stringops
     (-m32 is passed through CXXFLAGS/CFLAGS for the 32-bit version)

Benchmark specs:
   version: Standard POV-Ray 3.6 benchmark version 1.02
   command: ./povray --benchmark  (built-in benchmark mode which is equivalent
     to running  povray benchmark.ini)

Results:

32-bit mode
   Parse Time:    0 hours  0 minutes  2 seconds (2 seconds)
   Photon Time:   0 hours  0 minutes 40 seconds (40 seconds)
   Render Time:   0 hours 29 minutes 12 seconds (1752 seconds)
   Total Time:    0 hours 29 minutes 54 seconds (1794 seconds)

64-bit mode
   Parse Time:    0 hours  0 minutes  1 seconds (1 seconds)
   Photon Time:   0 hours  0 minutes 34 seconds (34 seconds)
   Render Time:   0 hours 23 minutes 45 seconds (1425 seconds)
   Total Time:    0 hours 24 minutes 20 seconds (1460 seconds)

	So on this machine, the 64-bit binary is roughly 20% faster than
the 32-bit binary when ran on the standard benchmark.

	- NC

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Granted it's not practical to run POV on a PS2, but I wanted to see how 
long it took, like running the benchmark on a DEC MicroVax running 
NetBSD just for yucks. Whereas the bulk of POV users are probably 
386-based Linux or Windows, with some Mac folks (of whom I'm one), it's 
interesting to see people using it in any capacity on different 
hardware. In other words, instead of "where do you use POV? Space, 
Antartica, etc.", it's "What do you use?"

In article <411ce45a$1@news.povray.org>,
 Nicolas Calimet <pov### [at] freefr> wrote:

> > I've got Povray running on a 
> > Sony PS2 running Linux....doing the benchmark.pov file took more than 
> > two weeks before it crashed.
> 
>         Ooops  :-)
> 
>         Considering how cheap is a relatively fast PC hardware nowadays,
> I would strongly recommand to forget the PS2...  For instance, benchmark.ini
> runs (succesfully) in about 35 minutes on an simple Athlon XP 2400+ or an
> Intel P4 2.6 GHz.  Going to a 64-bit compile (on Athlon64/Opteron machine)
> is also known to give an interesting speedup (compared to the 32-bit version
> ran on the same machine) but that's a different budget.
> 
>         I never tried POV on a Cray and I won't.  Crays are interesting only
> for highly parallelized/vectorized jobs (even that is changing).  POV-Ray is
> not yet parallalized as of version 3.6 (unofficial MPI/PVM patches for 3.5
> introduce some severe limitations or even problems).
> 
>         You should probably also forget about "older" architectures such as
> SGI Mips or Sun Sparc.  The former were designed for CAD, the second IIRC
> were most suited as servers.  None are good with floating-point intensive
> applications.
> 
>         DEC (now Compaq now HP) could be worth a try; at least an EV6
> machine was, back in 2000, much faster than a recent PC.  But it's far
> too expensive IMO.
> 
>         Honestly, prefer a good PC or Mac for running POV.  It's not
> by chance there is official support for these architectures.
> 
>         - NC

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Ron Olson wrote:
> Granted it's not practical to run POV on a PS2, but I wanted to see how 
> long it took, like running the benchmark on a DEC MicroVax running 
> NetBSD just for yucks. 

Haaaa, I like this way of thinking ;-D

 > Whereas the bulk of POV users are probably
> 386-based Linux or Windows, with some Mac folks (of whom I'm one), it's 
> interesting to see people using it in any capacity on different 
> hardware. In other words, instead of "where do you use POV? Space, 
> Antartica, etc.", it's "What do you use?"

So, I use perhasp the slowest "things" there.

* At home, I work on a Sun Ultra 5 @270 (and it's not not the fatest 
UltraSparc model :-(  ) under Solaris 8. I use it also as my main 
machine (Surfing, PHP, C++, ...).

* I also use an old SunServer5 @ 110 Mhz under NetBSD 1.6 : it houses my 
own webserver and I use it's free CPU time to render long scenes (as it 
runs 24/7)

* At work, I have installed povray on a old HP-712 @ 80 Mhz under HP-UX 
10.20 : not so bad machine.

Bye

Lolo

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Ron Olson <ols### [at] panixcom> wrote:
> This is an aside question....what is the hardware you run Povray on?
> Anyone running it on a Cray? Or a chip? I've got Povray running on a
> Sony PS2 running Linux....doing the benchmark.pov file took more than
> two weeks before it crashed.

I used to run POV-Ray (1.0) on a Cray X-MP (I think) and a T3E parallel
machine when I was studying.  OK, not regularly, you don't want to upset a
nation by delaying their weather forecasts, but I tried it a couple of
times.  I've also run POV on different SGIs ranging from Indy and O2
workstations to multi-processor Onyxes (?), and some end-of-the-eighties
(fast!) IBM mainframe running AIX.  That machine was being phased out at my
university back then, around 1993, and I was practically the only active
user on it for a while.  It rendered the full scenes/  @1024x768 +a0.3 in a
few days, compared to months it would've taken on my 486/33 ...

I've never found a unix machine I couldn't get (official) POV-Ray to run on,
usually out of the box or with very minor porting.  I should also mention
that I never ran any parallel version of POV-Ray on those big number
crunchers.

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> Crays are interesting only
> for highly parallelized/vectorized jobs (even that is changing).  

	Hehehe, for those interested, Cray is now going the "Linux on
massively parallel opterons" way  :-)  Expected move I'd say...

http://www.cray.com/products/xd1/index.html

	- NC

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