[Bf-committers] Blender and OpenMosix... does it have any sense ?

[Matthew H. Plough]

Ton has started to split the renderer off into threads so that you 
wouldn't need to split it off into processes if you were running a 
single system image on a cluster (i.e. Open Mosix).  If you're running 
multiple systems, it's easy to render a frame at a time on each using a 
renderfarm setup.  It's also possible just to open up a lot of blender 
executables on the same system and render frames that way.  Thus, while 
there isn't a perfect way to do Open Mosix right now, there are plenty 
of elegant hacks that will let you use it.

On a slightly different subject...
I've been playing around with the multithreaded renderer, and I can't 
seem to get it to exceed 78% overall CPU usage on my dual Opteron.  It 
looks like the renderer is in need of optimization -- it looks like he 
was really conservative and careful in making sure that there wouldn't 
be lots of annoying concurrency issues.  I just got through with a 
hardcore OS course on concurrency and would love to look at it, but I'm 
swamped right now and really can't.

Matt



malefico andauer wrote:

>Hi People,
>
>I was doing a few tests with Open Mosix, and after
>reading some papers, I realized that for Blender being
>able to use such clustering system, it has to be
>written/coded in a way that rendering can be splitted
>in different processes (this will sound incredible
>obvious for most of you, but you know...)
>
>I wonder if are there any plans or ideas to adapt
>blender so rendering could be turned into
>multiprocessing, so we can set up a renderfarm using
>Open Mosix ? Does this have any sense or current
>network rendering tools are already working OK so
>there is no need of Open Mosix whatsoever ?
>
>Regards.
>
>malefico.
>  
>