Distributed computing number crunching

[Xealous]

Hi all,

I was wondering if there were plans for a distributed computing add on. I have a few computers with a few Gig of ram each, and dual cores but I can only use one at a time =(.

It would be nice to load up a little distributed app that L3DT could make use of to crunch numbers and lower map generating times.

Just a thought.

Thanks,
X~

[Aaron]

Hi Xealous,

This popped up as a feature request a few months ago. I sill don' have an ETA, but I haven't forgotten about it. Basically I need to finish some of the multi-core work sheduled for v2.5a first, which includes splitting certain algorithms into nice tileable functions. Once that is complete, it should not (in principle) be too hard to have an instance of L3DT run as a server and multiple other ones run as render clients.

Cheers,
Aaron.

Edit: Oops, sorry, I had mis-typed your name.

[TrickyFishy]

Hi I just wanted to follow up on distributed processing of large maps. I see this has come up a couple times and I wanted to see if this was still on the radar?

[Aaron]

Hi TrickyFishy,

Thanks for the question. Distributed processing is still being actively developed, albeit at a slow and somewhat stop-start pace. As this feature would only ever be used by a small fraction of users, it tends to be pushed down the stack whenever anything more widely beneficial comes up, such as bugfixes, usability improvements, file I/O improvements, etc.

Consulting my last post on the subject, it seems that I did indeed get the network rendering going for the texture generator late last year, but still had some work to do regarding synchronisation of resources between different instances of L3DT. On top of that, there will still be work to do on the user interface (currently scripts only), extending network support to other calculations, building a cut-down client installer, remote management (possibly), stability testing, real-world system testing, etc.

I'm not going to guess at an ETA for this feature, other than to say that network rendering won't be ready in the next few months. Beyond that, it's difficult to say.

Best regards,
Aaron.