

Brute Force Rendering Using Google App Engine - coderdude
http://www.eddiescholtz.com/entry/google-app-engine-rendering

======
davedx
Cool, but this: "Much to my surprise, my Java implementation performed nearly
as well as the c++ version!"

Made me sigh. How long will it take to convince people that the JVM really is
actually pretty fast these days [1] and comparable with native code for the
majority of tasks?

[1] [http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64q/which-programming-
lan...](http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64q/which-programming-languages-
are-fastest.php?calc=chart&gcc=on&javasteady=on&java=on&clojure=on)

~~~
hcal
I read that line as a indication that Java wasn't his go-to language and he
just wasn't as comfortable with Java. Sort of a "wow I did better than I
thought." I would imagine anyone capable of building three versions of a
unique renderer would know that java can be pretty fast.

Just playing devils advocate.

------
krosaen
It's not clear how app engine is really helping here... or is this just
something he mentions as a theoretical possibility? To make use of all of
those cpus I'd think he'd need to distribute the load using the task queue, or
if necessary, multistep fan-out / fan-in with the help of the pipeline
library.

------
rorrr
It looks like you need to switch to GPU rendering. Here's a similar example,
done in WebGL, it renders very nicely in a browser, hundreds times faster than
your renerer:

<http://madebyevan.com/webgl-path-tracing/>

(switch material to mirror, it's pretty cool)

