[Bf-committers] Sunday meeting minutes, 25th feb 2007

[Joe Eagar]

Timothy Baldridge wrote:
> Interesting read. However, I seem to be missing the point of why it's
> better/safter than pthreads (granted it looks better). And with OpenMP
> we'd be locked into using gcc 4.2/gomp/etc.
>
> Don't forget that we have issues here with multi-platform. Any
> compiler extensions have to be supported on all OSes.
>
> I will mention that I really like the current threading API of
> blender. It's a nice wrapper for the pthreads library (and I think it
> wraps the win32 APIs as well right).
>
> I do really like the idea of at least backgrounding most of the tasks.
> Something that my experience with SGI Irix workstations has thought
> me, is that the interface response is 90% of the "experience", a slow
> GUI will make the whole App feel slow, but a fast GUI will make even a
> sluggish app seem fast.
>
>>> So maybe we could start listing this
>>> different kind of cases (up to a client "blender at home" for a huge
>>> gigantic distributed blender network... :-)).
>
> Sounds like a good idea, but let me point out that I'm not suggesting
> we aim for blender at home type of clustering. On the contrary, what I'm
> suggesting is networking for 1-10Gbit networking. This stuff is not
> that unreachable by most users of Blender.
>
> But you are right, there are some tasks that are suitable only for
> multi threading. But could not the same API model be used for both?
> Maybe not the current threading API, but a extended one perhaps. Then
> it would be possible to simply have different functions/macros for
> spawning pvm processes or threads.
>
> I don't think that all of Blender can be threaded by the next version,
> but I think we could get the API hammered out, and allot of the tasks
> backgrounded.
>
> BTW, where can we start a wiki on this?
>
> Timothy
http://mediawiki.blender.org

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Joe