About The BPP (Beowulf Pov-ray Project)
*Or so Oni has called it. Quite appropriate really....

But first, the prologue

Well, during my vacation I spent the first week playing this great game called City of Heros. Well, greatish really. It's fun and all, but it's an MMORPG and lacks enough variety to make it worth the time to truly play the game. Because of this, I don't plan to extend my account beyond the free month. But I got my $50 out of it during that first week logging well over 50 hours of gameplay (When I buy games, I go on the premise that I expect 1 hour of gameplay for each dollar the game costs.)

But the second week was much different. Rather than spending a lot of time playing video games, I instead focused on my many personal project interests, including:

• Re-ripping and recompressing my Love Hina discs. Yes I know it's in violation of the DMCA's copy protection clause, but if there was a way I could have the videos in a format that was as readily portable as the AVI files are and still be encrypted, I'd use it. Much like I use M4P from Apple.


• Working on another Anime Music Video. This one was also made from Love Hina, but was set to One Step Closer by Lincoln Park and was addressing life from Keitaro's point of view. I didn't get much more that 30 seconds in, but it took me something like 4 hours to get there...


• Designing a Buu suit for Nan Desu Kan this September (Check out the earlier post...)


• and Doing stuff with POV-Ray. Lots of stuff. I should post some of the renders in my gallery.

That last one got A LOT of my time. Especially the Brigade of Gummy Bears. Mostly because it took my AMD 3200+ XP CPU almost 10 minutes to render all 14,400 Gummy Bears, each complete with sewing pin sword and button shield. But that specific problem leads into BPP.

Because of the EXTREME CPU needs of POV-Ray, both OniAkki and I felt that we needed a way to spread out the workload of running POV-Ray. So we sat down and pondered the problem. We decided that we should write a program that allowed us to setup a list of needed frames in a database, and then have different client computers check out these frames and render them. So we set to this task.

The final product (Or at least as final as a simple tool between friends is gonna get,) although poorly coded since it didn't have to be overly robust, successfully rendered the 10 frames of a ship spin between 2 computers (Check out the jm.pov project on the nifty project management page that Oniakki wrote.)

We hope to apply the client to many computers and hopefully we'll get this thing to compile on Cygwin so we can use it in windows as well. ^^

The cool thing is that the client was the application I had ever written in C on Linux that used a library beyond the math lib. Using libMySQL and FTPLib was an excellent learning experience for me, and hopefully I'll be able to use that experience in the future.

I'm posting the client program (autopov) for public consumption and modification. You can find it on my Projects Page (Or might be able to when I actually create the Beowulf POV-Ray Project page, later this afternoon.) I need to do a large amount of work on it to get it truly ready for prime-time, but since it works well enough to do the work Oni and I want to do with it, updates to it and repairs won't be happening till I get around to it. If we really start using it a lot, we'll eventually get around to fixing it up, probably. ^^



- posted by Jim The Cactus @ 6/01/2004 09:30:43 AM | Permalink | (0) Comments. Add your own!