In article <37365B9C.6D5A47A7@interlog.com>, Dennis Clarke wrote:

  > I merely think that some form of investigation into a viable
  > client-server multi-threaded edition may be prudent at this time.
  
http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Lab/6386/pvmpov/index.html

I don't know if that's the original site, but that does what you want,
albeit perhaps not the way you want. this is the same version one would
install on a pile-of-pc's running Beowulf on Linux.

  > ps: I see no need to keep POV-Ray portable across "so many platforms". 
  > It may be wise to drop support on those systems that do not support
  > multi-threaded operating systems.  Merely a thought.

why are you so bent on multithreading? if your intention is to make povray
run faster, and I assume you will want to render multiple frames, why not
just start multiple instances of povray? that's what I do on my dual PPro, I
have a small perl hack that I use when I want to run an animation and it
keeps both my CPUs quite busy. I know there's also a job scheduler from GNU
somewhere, you just submit jobs and it starts them when the load is right.

with some hacking one could even write a script and a little tool to split
one scene in a given number, distribute the parts to different processes
(not threads) and combine the results.

multithreading povray is going to be a *huge* task with, AFAICS, little
advantage to it.

Lodewijk

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