Re: [Chromium-dev] more on dynamic tilesorting

[Brian P. <br...@tu...>]

Karl Rasche wrote:
>>I've implemented what I suggested yesterday and it seems to work
>>pretty well.  In fact, it doesn't seem awkward at all.  The config
>>script is the one place where we have global knowledge of the system
>>(number of servers, etc) and can easily implement a variety of layout
>>algorithms.
> 
> 
> i take it you are dividing to ensure equal area, or something along those
> lines? 

My demo script happens to use two servers with two tiles per server.
It's totally up the user, in general.


> i was thinking of the troubles arising in load balancing. if you want to
> divide using some scene dependant info (gemoetry, render time, texture, 
> etc), we would somehow have to feed that into the mothership.

Load balancing is tricky.  I see two solutions:

1. Leave it up to the client app.  By making cr[Get]ChromiumParameter()
calls the app can fetch stats (like vertices/tile) and specify new tiling.
We could at least write a sample function to do this which people could
customize.

2. Do it in the tilesort SPU.  It would look at vertices/tile or some
other metric and redefine the tiles.  But how often would you do that?
What's the min/max tile size?  How are the tiles distributed among the
servers?  I think it'll be hard to come up with a single algorithm to
cover all the possibilities.  Users shouldn't have to hack inside the
tilesort SPU in order to tweak the balancing/tiling.

I don't think the mothership is the right place to do load balancing.


> maybe i misunderstood.. i agree it would be a good stratagy if we already
> have everything (or, what we need to gather is minimal) on the mothership.

-Brian