[John Layne]

http://www.cpushare.com/

Edited subject

[Micha]

Great. If I understand right, my machine could work 24h per day at 100% for everybody and if I need CPU power, than I get the power of many CPUs back. It's like accumulated CPU power. Great idea. Will it work?

[Mihai]

It sounds like a great idea, but I'm not sure how it works exactly? Would us Maxwell users create our own "community" using this software, so that only Maxwell users will be able to connect to us?

[jdp]

seems to be a great idea... I signed in and trying to understand how it works.
What I am mostly concerned for now is how to free the machine for local use when needed and how to get reed of possible security risks. I am planning to let it running overnight: if I get valuable infos and results I let you know.
I don't think that there's a real benefit using it as closed community though...

[John Layne]

I only had a quick look at the site yesterday, after stumbling across it with the "Stumble" extension for Firefox, and thought such a system would have great possibilities.

If Next Limit could produce such a system solely for Maxwell users, such a system could be run on a subscription basis where users buy or sell and earned credits, with NL making their money via the subscription fee.

I have 3 PC's including a server that I'd happily make available, when I'm not using them. There are a lot of distributed computing systems out there SETI at home is one such system.
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/

Anyway worth a thought or two.

John

[Leonardo]

We need to do it guys!!! I remember posting about this idea long, long ago

[John Layne]

How much would you pay for such a service?

$100 US per year? I would

Come on NL, there are some dollars in it for you!

[Stephen]

I need to better understand how this works first, but I think it sounds very promising.

Although I wouldn't be interested unless it was closed to Maxwell users only. If it looked secure, I would put up a couple P4's to start.

[aitraaz]

Hmmm nicey, so how would this work in maxwell's case? Run mxcl in -server mode before pissing off to bed?

[b-kandor]

It would have to be automated, like a system tray program (the way seti works). Send out different seeds to the nodes as 'work units'.

The problem maybe is bandwidth - what happens if you want multilight - the mxi's are too big to transfer?

[aitraaz]

what happens if you want multilight - the mxi's are too big to transfer?

Yep i mean, a 4gb -ml .mxi merge accross a massive remote network might definitively destroy the earths ozone layer

[Leonardo]

Yep i mean, a 4gb -ml .mxi merge accross a massive remote network might definitively destroy the earths ozone layer

[Pietro Spampatti]

How much would you pay for such a service?

$100 US per year? I would

here another one...

P.

[Leonardo]

I e-mail them...

Here is their reply:

Hello,

On Mon, Oct 30, 2006 at 01:40:58AM +0100, donot_4get@yahoo.com wrote:
> Greetings,
> I'm part of a large comunity of people that uses Maxwell (a
> rendering engine that requires "lots" computer power).
> http://www.maxwellrender.com/
>
> This software requires that every computer connected to the network
> have a Maxwell license so I imagine it wouldn't work here at
> www.cpushare.com or am I wrong?

It entirely depends on Maxwell terms. You should ask them. However if
this software isn't open source or if they're not willing to port
their software to CPUShare, there's no way to run maxwell on top of
CPUShare. The CPUShare API isn't transparent, the software require
some modifications to use the CPUShare API.

> Now, is it possible... or would you guys be interested in
> formulating a system that will allow or comunity to render trough
> internet?

Until now there's just one guy, me . And yes I would be greatly
interested to allow your community to render through the
internet. Rendering is one of the applications that should be very
suitable for CPUShare.

I'd be also cool to port povray distributed rendering on top of
CPUShare.
> Also, many people have more licenses than cpus... (I have 8 licenses
> and 99% of the time I'm only using 2) could there be a way to share
> the licenses so people with no license culd still share cpu power?

See above, I can't answer that.

Thanks!

[Leonardo]

First, we should make a online data-base with all the textures needed so the textures paths don't get messup... or it would eliminate the constant upload of textures... something similar to the MXM gallery, Infact all the textures of the MXM gallery should concentrate in this database. So you use the materials from the MXM gallery and they are already in the On-line networkdata base.

Forget about multilight for now, That should recude the MXI files to 100-500MB. Also, if I remember right it was very effective to compressed those .MXI in zip or rar files (upto 80-90% compression?) Perhaps we will need to integrate in the process a compression of the files before they are sent/recieved.