Re: Distributed Raytracing, tools to use (RMI, WebService, something else)?

From:

=?ISO-8859-1?Q?Arne_Vajh=F8j?= <arne@vajhoej.dk>

Newsgroups:

comp.lang.java.programmer

Date:

Wed, 05 Mar 2008 19:58:49 -0500

Message-ID:

<47cf41bc$0$90266$14726298@news.sunsite.dk>

Daniel Pitts wrote:

I'm thinking about creating a Distributed Ray-tracer. I've created a
Ray-Tracer that is multi-threaded, and was thinking about ways to make
it multi-computer ;-)

My current set up:
I have a class Universe, which represents the scene, including lighting,
shapes, etc...
I have a class BlockTracer that traces a block of pixels, and sets part
of a BufferedImage to the value of those pixels.

My current thoughts are that I should use RMI.
I would make my Universe serializable. I would create a BlockQueue
class which will a block that needs to be traced to any node that is
ready. When a node grabs a block, it traces that block in the Universe,
and then sends a completed image fragment back to the Client.

Does this sound like a workable strategy? Should I use something other
than RMI? If some of my nodes are behind a firewall, can I use UPnP
with RMI?

RMI is convenient to use when working with complex data types.

If the work done for each call is significant, then the overhead
would be small.

And if you always let the clients initiate the connection and
your server are not behind a firewall or behind a firewall that
you control, then you should not get any problems.

Arne