Tips for running MPI versions

Tachyon supports the use of MPI for distributed memory rendering of complex scenes. Most commercial supercomputers and cluster vendors provide their own custom-tuned implementations of MPI which perform optimally on their hardware. Homegrown clusters typically use open source implementations of MPI. While Tachyon will work with any comformant implementation of MPI, some implementations perform much better than others. In the author's experience, the OpenMPI and MVAPICH implementations of MPI give the best performance on commodity cluster hardware.

john.stone@gmail.com