[Beowulf] noob understanding

[H.Vidal, Jr.]

Joe Landman wrote:
> John Vert wrote:
> 
>> At the risk of starting another religious flame war, I'll point out that
>> if you want to run a Windows application, you might want to consider a
>> Windows cluster. http://www.microsoft.com/hpc has more information.
> 
> 
> Hi John:
> 
>   I think the point a number of us made was that for 3D Studio Max as a 
> dependency and gating decision, that the windows cluster would be the 
> path of least resistance.  I am not sure of what the WCC product would 
> bring over and above plain-old-xp for this case.  If he was looking at a 
> product which ran on Linux, this wouldn't be an issue.

This is not entirely an issue, per se. The 3dsMax package has, as previously
noted and as well documented in Autodesk literature, hooks for external
renderers. The original author of the question noted he is using a
renderer that is, per the publisher, available under Linux. Autodesk
has documentation on the 3dsMax pages about their command line
tools for doing render dispatch across a network. All the pieces are
available to solve this problem. It is a relatively simple matter
of an appropriate level of research and application. It does not
have to be a hack from scratch.

To put it in more colloquial terms, a bit of RTFM is suggested
and seems applicable. I spent about 15 minutes researching the issue
and founds *lots* of ready made resources to tackle the problem.
If one were involved in full-time CG production, once would assume
that a bit more well-placed research would clearly indicate a
largely off-the-shelf solution. This has been done, and been sold,
before. It does not have to be re-invented.

Just a (hopefully constructive) thought.

hv

> 
>   Aside from that, the only significant belief systems that have been 
> questioned here as of late are the (distributed) shared memory versus 
> distributed memory.  I haven't seen too much flamage in the recent past, 
> and certainly not over DSM vs DM.
> 
> Joe
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