Compile parallel (threaded) povray 3.7 on Debian Wheezy

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Expanding my little cluster has got me thinking about additional uses for it. The primary purpose is obviously work i.e. MD simulations using gromacs and ab initio calcs using NWChem and Gaussian. I'm also testing it with John the Ripper to see how well the users of the linux box in the lab are choosing their passwords.

At that point I realised that it'd be sweet to have at least an OMP capable version of povray to speed things up when polishing figures for those elusive journal covers.

Debian testing currently uses v. 3.6.1 of povray but

  POV-Ray 3.6 does not support multithreaded rendering. POV-Ray 3.7 does.

So compile we will although v 3.7 is beta, so be aware.

sudo mkdir /opt/povray
sudo chown $USER /opt/povray

wget http://povray.org/redirect/www.povray.org/beta/source/povray-3.7.0.RC6.tar.gz
tar xvf povray-3.7.0.RC6.tar.gz
cd povray-3.7.0.RC6/

sudo apt-get install libboost-all-dev libpng-dev libjpeg-dev libtiff-dev

Note: libboost-all-dev is big. It might be enough with libboost-thread-dev

./configure --prefix=/opt/povray --program-suffix=_3.7 COMPILED_BY="me@here"

===============================================================================POV-Ray 3.7.0.RC5 has been configured.Built-in features:  I/O restrictions:          enabled  X Window display:          disabled  Supported image formats:   gif tga iff ppm pgm hdr png jpeg tiff  Unsupported image formats: openexrCompilation settings:  Build architecture:  x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu  Built/Optimized for: x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu (using -march=native)  Compiler vendor:     gnu  Compiler version:    g++ 4.7  Compiler flags:      -pipe -Wno-multichar -Wno-write-strings -fno-enforce-eh-specs -s -O3 -ffast-math -march=native -pthreadType 'make check' to build the program and run a test render.Type 'make install' to install POV-Ray on your system.The POV-Ray components will be installed in the following directories:  Program (executable):       /opt/povray/bin  System configuration files: /opt/povray/etc/povray/3.7  User configuration files:   $HOME/.povray/3.7  Standard include files:     /opt/povray/share/povray-3.7/include  Standard INI files:         /opt/povray/share/povray-3.7/ini  Standard demo scene files:  /opt/povray/share/povray-3.7/scenes  Documentation (text, HTML): /opt/povray/share/doc/povray-3.7  Unix man page:              /opt/povray/share/man===============================================================================

The way it is configured we can keep our debian version of povray and install the newer version (povray_3.7)

make
make install

Seems like -geometry 1000x1000 doesn't work anymore. Instead use -H1000 -W1000

I've played around with it a little bit and it does parallel (threaded) execution nicely.

wget http://www.ms.uky.edu/~lee/visual05/povray/fourcube7.pov
./povray_3.7 -H1000 -W1000 fourcube7.pov +A0.1
takes 9 seconds on an AMD II X3. The standard, serial Debian version takes 21 seconds.