Linux and Parallel Computing? Softimage, Maya

[enygma]

With the Mental Ray satellite nodes in Maya 6.5, you would be able to do this no problem. I have done it myself at the office on 2 Windows machines, 3 Linux machines and a Powerbook. The Powerbook was the slower of the bunch mind you, but it was still possible and it still worked just fine.

[Srek]

Is it possible to use 2 PCs and a Mac using Linux versions of either Maya, Softimage

To the best of my knowledge only Linux versions of Maya and XSI for x86 Linux are available. A Power PC based Linux version is not available for any 3D app i know of.
Other then that i would refrain from using vastly different processor types (Power / x86) in a mixed environment. Due to differences in FPU precision you can get differences in rendered images.

Cheers
Björn

[alvin777]

That's good news. Does Windoes have some lke this? If it's also possible to do this using WAN, like in the SETI project where they use idle CPU time from around the world to create a supercomputer. Is there are group or service that uses Maya or XSI that are willing to risk their computers to help each other out render things faster. (If there's no service, maybe we could create a business model with that, like a render on demand service. Anyone. lol?)

Is the diffrence in precision gonna' have a significant flaw on the render? Is this caused by the CPUs being 64-bit and the other being a 32-bit or is it because of the OS, say Linux being 64-bit and the other a 32-bit OS or thirdly is it because say, both are 64-bit CPUs like an Athlon 64 & a G5 although the same, they're floating point values are diffrent?

God bless,
Alvin http://www.applecatholic.com
Philippines

[Srek]

Don't mix up adress bus width and integer precision with FPU calculation precision. Those are unrelated. FPU precision is simply different for x86 (64 to 80 Bit) and G4/G5 (64 Bit). This has nothing to do with the OS.
Also SETI is very different to 3D rendering in that it only needs small packages of information that need a lot of computational work. 3D rendering needs a lot more data (scene and textures) making distributed rendering only feasable if you have high bandwith connections between the nodes (100 MBit Ethernet).
Cheers
Björn

[Vertizor]

More importantly, a WAN distributed rendering is not feasible UNLESS those remote nodes also have a license for Mental Ray. If you're not using MR than no worries.

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