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Re: [Condor-users] PVM for OS X/Win32?



On Tue, Sep 28, 2004 at 07:24:37PM -0500, Matthew Braun wrote:
> Greetings,
> 
> I'm new to the world of Condor, as it was suggested by a professor as a 
> method for building a low-cost renderfarm using distributed resources. 
> So far, I've build up a ghetto 3-machine pool (2x  i386-Debian + 1x 
> PPC-OSX with a USparc-Solaris box on the way) and it's functional, but 
> I would think that in order to truly parallelize the rendering I'd have 
> to use the PVM contrib module, which does not exist for OS X or Win32 
> in the 6.6.6 release. PVM does support OS X and Win32, so I'm curious 
> if there are any plans to create the appropriate modules for Condor?

Because of the way the PVM code is written, it's very unlikely that 
the existing code will ever be ported to Windows. The Mac OSX port
is more likely, though we don't have anyone working on it now. 

We're working on some new parallel job support, and part of that
might make PVM support easier to do on Windows, but we'll see, it's
a bit outside of the scope of what we're trying to accomplish

Most people who do renderfarms with Condor don't use PVM or MPI, BTW.
Instead, most of them split the animation up into multiple jobs and
just submit them that way, and reassemble them later - no need for 
PVM, since the rendering is entirely embarassingly parallel. We
wrote a supercomputing demo a few years back that split up POVRay
scene files into seperate jobs and farmed them out - we were rendering
on Windows, Solaris, Linux, SGI, and Alpha machines all at the same time.
(POVRay can take commandline argument to say where to start rendering from,
so for each frame you can submit a number of jobs, each with a subsection
of each frame)

We've also written a tool to take a Maya animation file, parse it to figure 
out what textures and other externals it needs, and generate a Condor submit
file for it - you could say how many subjobs you want it to generate, so 
you can parallelize your render:

http://www.cs.wisc.edu/condor/tools/maya/

> Also, I was wondering as to why the Condor source is no longer 
> available? I know it's possible to request it, but it's not public. Was 
> this a security measure?
> 

Not really. We're undoing that decision, but we're not ready to release the
source. Someday...

-Erik