[Animabob-announce] animabob-announce: AnimaBob 1.4.0 Released

[Grant E. <eri...@um...>]

AnimaBob
Version 1.4.0 Released

Latest Release

The latest release, version 1.4.0, is available at:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=3D195178&package_id=3D230=
3
73&release_id=3D514352

1.4.0

The latest release of AnimaBob, 1.4.0, largely focuses on completing the
transition of AnimaBob to a total open-systems port by replacing support fo=
r
SGI/Sequent m_fork et al with POSIX threads (aka pthreads). Other, minor
changes include:

> * Consolidated and updated the AnimaBob reference page.
> * Coding style clean-ups.
> * Compiler warning clean-ups.

> Threads
>=20
> Threads are now an automatic, conditional configuration option for AnimaB=
ob.
> When the POSIX threading (aka pthreads) library is detected, support for
> threading in AnimaBob is automatically enabled.
>=20
> When threading support is included, AnimaBob selects, by default, the num=
ber
> of threads that is equivalent to the number of active, online processors =
in
> the system (as retrieved by sysconf or sysctl). The user can, however,
> override this by supplying the =8C-threads=B9 or =8C-t=B9 command line option:
>=20
>        -threads, -t threads
>                Specifies  the  number  of  threads  to run simultaneously=
. The
>                default is the number of processors currently online and a=
vail-
>                able for executing threads.
>=20
> Multiple threads are primarily used in AnimaBob to prepare and analyze a =
data
> volume  prior  to  rendering. Specifying  more threads than there are
> processors in the system may not improve AnimaBob performance and may, in
> fact, make it worse.
>=20
> As eluded to above, this version of AnimaBob completely eliminates suppor=
t for
> the SGI/Sequent m_fork et al interfaces. However, this should not pose an
> issue as SGI Irix systems have supported pthreads for as long, if not lon=
ger,
> than most other systems and should certainly be available on any modern S=
GI
> Irix system.

Regards,

Grant Erickson
AnimaBob Maintainer
>=20