Hello there!

I've been using MegaPOV on a Macintosh, and would like to be able to use both
cores on an SMP machine, as well as clusters.

I've used both MPI and XLMRPC (for digital audio processing), but the various
extensions to POV-Ray and MegaPOV don't appear to support MacOSX SMP machines
or clusters thereof. Is there some patch or new version I'm missing?

I know about the new SMP POV-Ray and Megapov-XRS, but can't find Mac ports.

....any reply appreciated...

Stephen Pope
U C Santa Barbara

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"StephenPope" <stp### [at] createucsbedu> wrote:
> Hello there!
>
> I've been using MegaPOV on a Macintosh, and would like to be able to use both
> cores on an SMP machine, as well as clusters.


Sorry to be mostly ignorant, but could it be that you wish to make animations,
using multiple cores and/or multiple Macs?

If so then there may be some easy solutions.

For instance, I believe one can make copies of MegaPov and run each copy
concurrently. So, if you were making an animation, one copy could do frames 1
to 49, the second copy could do frames 50 to 99, and so on. Each referencing
the same scene file, and the same settings. Then the images can be all linked
up using QuickTime Pro.

Apple itself has some kind of distributed-processing software. I know nothing
about it. Possibly it could come into play.

I myself haven't tried using multiple copies of MegaPov but I do happen to have
UNIX POV on my dual-core Mac as well as MegaPov and there is not problem using
both at once, moreover, when I do so it rather pleasingly maxes out both
processor cores, and, kudos to Apple, I can still use all my other apps almost
normally!

Good luck,

Russell Towle

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