Chess2

This is our first ray trace experiment that works on our new cluster: ShadowFax! This image is 4000 horizontal by 2700 vertical pixels (just over 10 megapixels) with a 3 byte color depth (30 megabytes). The original file was created in just under 3 minutes using 48 cores in ppm format. We used the GIMP to reformat as a jpeg bringing the size down to about 750KB! We used batch programming to distribute the job to each of the 24 compute nodes and povray to render the image. Each compute node is a dual-core AMD Athlon 64-bit processor running at 2 GHz. However, we have yet to find a 64-bit operating system we like, so we are just using 32-bits for now! Each PC has 700 MB of RAM, 120 GB hard disk and switched GigeBit ethernet. The input file comes as part of the povray 3.6 installation (chess2.pov). Enjoy!