Does GIMP Work With MOSIX?

strredwolf asks: "Has anyone tried using GIMP with MOSIX? I have a few computers here doing nothing, and I'm wondering if GIMP could be spread out through multiple computers (x86, of course, they're 486's and Pentiums). That would help out the render times I have with just the 500Mhz AMD K6-2 I have."

Comments

For goodness sake...

[Anonymous Coward]

We need a new moderation category for Ask Slaskdot - how about "-1, throw out your old decrepid hardware and spend a few bucks, will ya?"

Honestly, look at all the questions about doing really, um, interesting, uses for old hardware. Heck, the time it would take most of you to implement these cheeseball ideas, you could work at freakin' Mickey-Ds and make enough cash to buy the latest and greatest at what you're trying to do.

Potential Y2K BIOS issues aside, you will not significantly help your render times, but you might be able to set up another computer with a web browser and IP masquerading so you can download more pr0n while you retouch what you already have with your faster machine(s). That's about it. No 1-cow rendering farm for you.

Re:For goodness sake...

[strredwolf]

Considering I'm jobless, and McDonalds only wants 17-year olds for employees, I'm kinda stuck with older hardware. If you can call an AMD K6-2 at 500 Mhz, another Pentium MMX at 200Mhz, and several 486's that only want to netboot "old".

It looks like a GIMP design problem. Great. Oh well.

--
WolfSkunks for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.keenspace.com";

Blender as well?

[Elvii]

While it'd be nice if gimp used mosix (I wish i could confirm/deny) it seems more useful if blender could use it... Having only two boxes, no way i can test is here unfortunatly.

bash: ispell: command not found

Re:Blender as well?

[Bazman]

Why no way can you test it? Mosix works fine on two boxes. You dont need a front-end machine at all, unlike some clustering solutions. You can set it up as a peerless cluster. Processes on machine A migrate to machine B if A is a bit busy, processes started on B flip to A if they get a chance. They jump back to B if something starts up on A. The system balances itself out, taking care of any difference in CPU power between the cluster machines.

I dont know much about blender, but if you are rendering an animation and the frames are independent, then with an N-node mosix cluster you can render N frames at once.

There's discussion of a blender network renderer on http://www.blender.nl/opensource/brd.php and a mailing list. With mosix, you'd just tell blender to fork a maximum of N rendering jobs, and let the kernel sort out the distribution!

Baz

It runs, but is it worth it?

[Bazman]

gimp certainly runs on our mosix cluster, but since it does an awful lot of disk I/O when dealing with large and complex images the processes will often stick on the home node and not get the benefit of migrating to a faster machine.

mosix cannot run gimp plugins faster by distributing them over CPUs in a mosix cluster - unless the plugin forks several processes which mosix can then migrate if there's a benefit to running them on a remote mosix node.

The folks on www.mosix.org and associated mailing lists are very friendly and helpful.

Baz

mosix, i/o and shared memory

[1010011010]

If you enable and use DFSA, you might get some mileage out of it. But in general, Mosix makes a cluster of computers look like a big SMP system. Anything that uses shared memory and/or incurs lots of I/O will probably not migrate, and if you force it, will run slower. Remote I/O is not as efficient, and puts additional load on the home-node processor.

You might be better off writing pvm-aware plugins for gimp...

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the gimps eyes are watching

[variable26]

OT, How long did it take me to notice the gimp's eyes move?? duh, v26