FW: [UMN_MAPSERVER-USERS] Cluster/Supercomputer/HPC variants of Mapserver

[Moran Ben-David]

My mistake... I sent this to Paul and not the list.  

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Moran Ben-David [mailto:moran at place-base.com]
> Sent: Thursday, January 19, 2006 12:13 PM
> To: 'Paul Ramsey'
> Subject: RE: [UMN_MAPSERVER-USERS] Cluster/Supercomputer/HPC variants of
> Mapserver
> 
> Paul,
> 
> Forgive my ignorance, but I'm wondering exactly what you mean by
> "assembled at the end".
> 
> Specifically, I am wondering if your implying that the images created by
> the farm would need to be transparent PNG's?  And therefore, the "master"
> would then stack these images up much like ka-map does in a browser.
> 
> Thanks,
> Moran
> 
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: UMN MapServer Users List [mailto:MAPSERVER-USERS at LISTS.UMN.EDU] On
> > Behalf Of Paul Ramsey
> > Sent: Thursday, January 19, 2006 11:51 AM
> > To: MAPSERVER-USERS at LISTS.UMN.EDU
> > Subject: Re: [UMN_MAPSERVER-USERS] Cluster/Supercomputer/HPC variants of
> > Mapserver
> >
> > You have not really explained your issues in a detail sufficient to
> > give any practical advice.  As always, analyze the problem for areas
> > of parallelism.  There is no built-in mechanism for MPI in Mapserver,
> > but if you wanted to really bust up the code, the obvious place of
> > inefficiency is the fact that all layers are drawn serially.
> >
> > A hack to get around that is to bust up your mapping file, into one
> > layer per map file.  Then give each layer to a different machine.
> > Then write a new "master" map file that reads from all the children
> > as WMS layers.  Put that on yet another machine.  Because Mapserver
> > sends out the WMS requests in parallel you can get all the layers
> > rendered simultaneously on your farm, and then assembled at the end
> > on the master.
> >
> > Paul
> >
> > On Jan 19, 2006, at 8:10 AM, Biz King wrote:
> >
> > > Hi All.
> > >
> > > Is anyone aware of anywhere (or better still, has experience of)
> > > running Mapserver via an MPI/Grid interface or as a cluster?
> > >
> > > We're trying to develop a high-performance mapserver that can cope
> > > with the load we're going to be throwing at it!  Currently it takes
> > > 298 seconds (on a Mac OSX Server, 3.5 Gb Ram, dual 2Ghz processors)
> > > to do what we need done on under 60 seconds!  There's not much we
> > > can do to cut down the load as we're creating a whole series of
> > > nodes on a layer via a database and we're then creating the imagery
> > > based on these items and outputting them to graphics formats in
> > > varying sizes.
> > >
> > > The results get fed to users on demand without the delays
> > > associated with 'on the fly' image creation.
> > >
> > > Any help will be welcomed!
> > >
> > > cheers
> > >
> > > Biz