[$Id: RedsNightmare.ReadMe,v 1.4 1993/06/14 17:00:34 jnweiger Exp asklingl $]

"Red's Nightmare" was produced in countless hours in which we should have been
doing some serious work, like working on our masters thesis, with a hacked
Rayshade 4.0.6 by

			Andreas Klingler
			Rudolf  Koenig
			Michael Schroeder
			Juergen Weigert

at the
Institute for Mathematical Machines and Data Processing IV (Operating Systems)
University of Erlangen-Nuernberg, Germany.

EMail: i4ray@informatik.uni-erlangen.de
SMail: Martensstrasse 1, 91058 Erlangen

"Red's Nightmare" was created on location in "Manlobby's". The shop with the
finest software at the FAU.

                              ---* COPYRIGHT *---
The animation "Red's Nightmare" is copyrighted by the University of
Erlangen-Nuernberg. It may be freely redistributed for non commercial purposes
only. Any redistribution must include the following files:

			RedsNightmare.ReadMe    (this file)
			RedsNightmare_poster.jpg
			RedsNightmare.mpg	(the complete animation)
(braindead filesystems may abbreviate the filenames)

Any stills out of the animation must be acompanied by this ReadMe.

If you don't obey these rules we will create a nasty animation about you and
spread it over the net.

                              ---* COPYRIGHT *---

Rendering took place on MEMSY, a MIMD parallel computer being developed
here [1], and a couple of HP and SUN workstations. Totaling to about 110 CPUs.
Each frame was divided into small rectangular blocks which were assigned to
a pool of CPUs. A CPU finishing its block was assigned a yet uncovered area
or, in lack of new blocks, helped another CPU to finish its assignment.
When a pool of CPUs had finished its frame it asked a server running on one
machine for the next framenumber to compute.
This algorithm is fault tolerant as long as not all CPUs of a pool die while
computing a frame. In this case this single frame has to be recomputed by
another pool after all the other frames are finished.

For the final animation we used four pools, sorted by machine type:
MEMSY  (80 Motorola 88100K processors)
HP     (7 machines Series 735)
SUN.a  (10 machines Sparc 2)
SUN.b  (15 machines mostly Sparc 10)

Wall clock time for the 1050 frames was about 48 hours (we can't tell exactly
because we did not render the whole animation in one part). The simplest
frames took about 1 minute, while the frames where the pump materializes are
a real CPU hog. They took about 60 minutes. (Remember that four frames where
computed in parallel at any time)
The complete animation is 1210 frames (the stills where the title is shown
where rendered once and copied) and should be played at 10 frames per second.
So it should take 2 minutes and 1 second if you play it at the right rate
(on a HP750 we get 11 fps with the Berkeley MPEG-Player in 2x2 dither mode).

Image size is 320x240x24 which makes 265 MB for the whole animation.
MPEG compression was performed with the Portable Video Research Group's
encoder PVRG-MPEG 1.2alpha on a HP735 in 45 minutes.
The MPEG file is  3.65 MB long which gives a compression ratio of 1:76 .

Normally we use parallel raytracing to benchmark the computing power of
different parallel computers. It gives a good instruction mix and there is
no need for synchronisation. And of course it's much more fun than running
some stupid number crunching benchmarks.


Animator:  GenAnim by Andreas Klingler
Renderer:  Rayshade by Craig Kolb (with some extensions by Michael Schroeder)
Textures:  put everywhere (even where you would not expect them)
	   by Michael Schroeder
Parallelisation:
	   Master by Rudolf Koenig
Titler:    Xpain by Rudolf Koenig and Juergen Weigert
Modeller:  vi  (Well, that's not a modeller, but that is what Juergen used.
                If anybody has a modeller to donate ...)

Many thanks to:
		Dr. Claus Uwe Linster for allowing us to use the computers
		and all the other members of IMMD4 who did not blame us for
		driving up the load of their machines.

Apologies to:
		the students using the CIP-Pool who _did_ blame us for
		driving up the load of their machines.


Finally we would like to apologize to Pixar for the title of the animation,
however initially the unicycle was inspired by Rudi's real unicycle with which
he endangers the students on campus from time to time. The model looks almost
exactly like the real one.

       [Wait for "Red's Revenge" coming to a computer near you soon]


[1] G. Fritsch, W. Henning, H. Hessauer, R. Klar, C.U. Linster, C.W. Oehlrich,
    P. Schlenk, J. Volkert, "Distributed Shared Memory Multiprocessor
    Architecture MEMSY for High Performance Parallel Computations", Computer
    Architecture News, ACM Press, Vol. 17, No. 6, December 1989, pp. 22-35