I was wondering if there is something that will allow a machine of more than
one cpu to render an image faster. As I couldn't find one, I've written
something in python that takes a render, divides it into X vertical slices,
say 20, then runs as many render processes as there are CPUs available to
it. On completion of all slices, it joins them all up into the product.

Some points on it:

 o It leaves the decision of which CPU to give a render to, upto
   the kernel which up until now has done the job perfectly ok.

 o If the process is stopped, the next time it runs it will go through
   all generated slices, make sure they are valid, png format, correct
   dimentions, and finally md5sum (I'm not sure if this is a good idea
   as images with any kind of a random aspect may pose an issue,
   although I havnt had an issue yet.)

 o Once I've done a little more fine tuning, and if there is any
   intrest, I'll post the benchmark, but I think it's safe to assume
   that >1 cpus rendering will be much faster than one, the overhead of
   joining multiple slices and file verifications are relatively small.

Nima

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