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Re: [MANTA] Running on a fat-node cluster


Chronological Thread 
  • From: Abe Stephens <abe@sci.utah.edu>
  • To: Shreekanth Pavar <shreekanth.pavar@ucl.ac.uk>
  • Cc: MANTA <manta@sci.utah.edu>
  • Subject: Re: [MANTA] Running on a fat-node cluster
  • Date: Thu, 22 Mar 2007 16:13:05 -0600

My intention is to follow up on a suggestion made by Hansong Zhang at SGI to
port Manta to run on a fat-node (i.e. multicore) cluster. As far as I know,
this has not yet been tried. This would form the bulk of the implementation
work for my PhD.
No one has ported Manta to a cluster, however another IRT architecture, OpenRT has enjoyed great success on clusters. It is able to leverage multiple cores, I think in a more sophisticated manner than just starting up more renderer processes per processor. OpenRT doesn't (or didn't) support massive data set distribution, so for things like the 777 data set it is run on shared memory systems.

 I eventually plan to also introduce a data decomposition scheme.
With your permission, this could be the one which you used in the above paper.
I'm not sure if that dirt code is around still, as I believe it predates our current repository. The code certainly predates modern multi-core/simd CPU architectures, and uses an older software architecture than Manta. Still it might be a useful reference.

Steve might have a better idea of what its status is.

Abe





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