Computational Cluster Programs

How to Run POV-Ray on ATS-Hosted Clusters

You can use any text editor to make the appropriate input files for POV-Ray.

How to Run POV-Ray in Batch

This would be a great program for running in Batch. ????

To Run POV-Ray from the UCLA Grid Portal

POV-Ray is not available from the UCLA Grid Portal.

To Run POV-Ray from the Cluster Login Node using the Queue Scripts

It is recommended that you run povray in batch in two situations:

• to render high quality images.
• to render images for an animation.

To render in batch we recommend the following POV-Ray options:

-D

Do not display the image.

+FN or +FP

Save a PNG or PPM image respectively.

+A

Turn on anti-aliasing.

POV-Ray can generate the frames of a movie using its animation options in cases when motion or other factors change with time. This requires only a single invocation of POV-Ray. For example, it is an ideal way to render a movie in which the camera rotates around the scene so that the scene can be viewed from all sides. To render the frames of a movie in which the geometry for each frame comes from a different time step of a simulation, you could have one POV-Ray scene file for each time step and submit the rendering to batch using SGE Job Arrays

The easiest way to run POV-Ray in batch from the login node is to use the queue scripts. See Running a Batch Job on an ATS-Hosted Cluster for a discussion of the queue scripts and how they are used.

The following queue scripts are available for POV-Ray:

povray.q

Runs in serial.

??? JES of course this is fiction right now but it is the correct way to run this program ???

To Run POV-Ray from the Cluster Login Node Using SGE Comands

See Running a Batch Job on an ATS-Hosted Cluster for guidelines to follow to create the required SGE command file. Alternatively, you could create an SGE command file with one of the queue scripts listed above. After saving the command file, you can modify it if necessary. See Commonly-Used SGE Commands for a list of the most commonly used SGE commands.

How to Run POV-Ray Interactively

To Run POV-Ray Interactively from the UCLA Grid Portal

POV-Ray is not a GUI application on Linux and thus it cannot be run directly from the Interactive Service of the UCLA Grid Portal.

However, you can run it interactively from the Grid Portal by running an xterm on the Hoffman2 Cluster. Then issue the appropriate POV-Ray command from the command line of the xterm window.

To Run POV-Ray Interactively from a Cluster Interactive Node

To run POV-Ray interactively you must first connect to the cluster login node with X11 forwarding enabled. Then use qrsh to obtain an interactive session. Then issue the command:

povray argument-list

This will automatically run POV-Ray for you on one of the interactive nodes of the Hoffman2 Cluster.

For example, the following command could be used for testing:

povray filename.pov +D -FN +W400 +H400

Here filename.pov it the name of the file that contains the description of the geometry for the scene. +D requests that the output image be displayed; -FN requests that an image not be saved. +W400 +H400 specifies the image width and height at 400 x 400.