distributed rendering

[Christoph Fabianek]

Thanks for testing! - here some answers

> 1) Does nspovray need special firewall rules? Some open ports?
NetSolve uses randomly ports from 9000-9204. I agree that this is a large 
range but for backward compatibility they don't want to change it. There was 
some time ago a patch for NetSolve which limits the ports to a few (don't 
know exactly how many, but I think about 20-30 or so). I will look into this 
when everything else is running stable, but let me know what your priorities 
are!

> Network traffic shows transmission at about 5k/s but almost no receiving,
> with a single box in the scene. And I'm on broad band.
That is definitly much, but I can't do much about this. What happens is that 
nspovray builds a .ini file which contains all options and a tar file that 
includes all necessary files (*.pov, *.inc ...). These two files are sent to 
each server and when it is finished the TGA is sent pack. I don't know about 
the internal protocol of NetSolve.

>
> I only get this output in the povray output window:
>
> Initializing NetSolve...
> Initializing NetSolve Complete
> Sending Input of Task 6590 to Server anakin04.sinrg.cs.utk.edu
> Sending Input of Task 6591 to Server anakin04.sinrg.cs.utk.edu
> Sending Input of Task 6592 to Server anakin04.sinrg.cs.utk.edu
> Sending Input of Task 6593 to Server anakin04.sinrg.cs.utk.edu
> Sending Input of Task 6594 to Server anakin02.sinrg.cs.utk.edu
> Sending Input of Task 6595 to Server anakin02.sinrg.cs.utk.edu

If you don't get any output like
Downloading output from anakin04.sinrg.cs.utk.edu
this is probably because of a firewall. You can either try to open the ports 
mentioned above or use the SSH transport. To test this create a file e.g. 
"ssh_hosts" with the following line
localhost user /usr/bin/povray /usr/share/povray/include/
or something like that. This should also be much faster than using the 
NetSolve grid (but you need to have a login at the machines and auto-login 
via ssh)

Btw, you may also try nspovray at the command line - let me know what output 
you get there:
$ export NETSOLVE_AGENT=netsolve.cs.utk.edu
$ ./nspovray +iicl.pov


> 2) What I don't like is that you put all nspovray options in the render
> modes. Global nspovray options should be in a separate settings page in the
> settings dialog. Only options like number of instances and tile width
> should be in the render modes.

Ok, this is a general discussion. I also thought about splitting the options 
to different dialogs (and the first implementation was actually splitted) - 
here my reasons why I have collected them in a single tab in the Render Modes 
dialog:

- I like to have options of a logical entity at a single place - even if that 
means to enter them for each scene (the only option that make sense to move 
outside would be "nspovray Path" - and you have the file selector to do this 
quickly. So, no big deal in my opinion.)

- I wanted the patch to be as less intrusive as possible

>
> 3) If you change the transport type, the agent or hostfile setting gets
> lost.
ok, again something with a quite low priority - I will do it when I have 
finished the documentation and you have a working version...


> Is the povray output shown?
No, you currently don't get the output and this will require a change in 
nspovray - not big, but something I will do in a later version.

> What happens when the scene contains errors?
It will not work und you get an error that nspovray can't compose the image. 
This is high priority but again something to be done on the nspovray side. 
Something I didn't mentioned before but I see nspovray especially to be used 
when someone renders a finished scene on a large scale with all options 
turned on and then it would make sense to do this in 1 hour on 5 machines 
instead of 5 hours on the local machine (at least this was the idea behind).

> The feature freeze has been delayed.
What are the consequences for kpovmodeler - do you also plan to shift back the 
feature freeze? Especially, will the distributed rendering go into KDE 3.2?


Greetings,
   Christoph