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From: schooler@isi.edu.
Newsgroups: comp.parallel
Subject: Re: simple coarse-grained parallel programs
Message-ID: <12222@hubcap.clemson.edu>
Date: 12 Dec 90 12:32:40 GMT
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In article <12179@hubcap.clemson.edu, anand@elsa.top.cis.syr.edu 
(Rangachari Anand) writes:
>Anyway, I wonder if there is a survey about packages developed 
>for this task. More to the point, it would be interesting to know the 
>speeds obtained for specific problems. Here are a few systems that I am 
>aware of:
> ...
>
>3. There seems to be some work at Brown University in distributing
>ray-tracing over workstations.

    The Apollo animation, "A long ray's journey into light", which appeared
    at SIGGRAPH '85, was made by distributed ray-tracing.  Each frame
    was farmed out to an idle workstation on the net.  I believe upwards
    of 100 machines were used to complete the work.  The more humorous
    statistic was the number of hours in total this took; I seem to
    recall something like 8 or 10 thousand.  The video includes these
    stats at the end of the film, which was only about 3 minutes in
    duration!

In article <12190@hubcap.clemson.edu> feldy@cs.ucla.edu writes:
>R.E. Felderman, E.M. Schooler, L. Kleinrock
>The Benevolent Bandit Laboratory: A Testbed for Distributed Algorithms
>IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications
>Vol 7, No. 2
>February 1989

AND 

In article <12205@hubcap.clemson.edu> gt4589b@prism.gatech.edu 
(Davis, Jr., Martin H.) writes:
>I don't believe I would have thought of looking in JSAC for such an
>article (though there are others types of articles I look in JSAC
>for).  I'm sure you had a good reason for this subject's being pub-
>lished in JSAC, but that reason is not immediately obvious to me.

    That particular JSAC happened to be a special issue on Personal Computer
    Communication.  We had come at the problem of parallelism from a 
    communications perspective.  Having designed the BBL system to run on a 
    network of idle PC's, the special issue struck us very appropriate.