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[jluck]

Hello,

I run a small business which deals with massive graphic files, mostly in Adobe Photoshop. At the moment, expenses prevent me from purchasing a completely new system to handle the files, however, I do have an older desktop computer (both computers have Windows XP) that I would (if possible) like to hook up to my main computer and make usage of parallel processing.

I am very new to this idea and I'm not a computer programmer nor a server administrator.

Would this software allow me to make the most out of the two machines I have available to me? Would it improve my performance when dealing with such large files? If so, how exactly do you "set up" two computers for parallel processing (via ethernet, serial port?)?

Any advice or information would be appreciated!

Jason

[lolo]

Hello Jason,

Thank you for your interest in this forum.

For parallel processing, distributed among two or more computers, you will need two levels of communication between these computers:
[list=1]

• First level is mostly made of hardware and a relatively thin layer of software. In your case that would an ethernet card + the network driver in Windows XP. At this level, computers do communicate, but mostly about files and folders, and do not know yet how to coordinate their efforts to perform a job in parallel to make it faster.
• The second level is generally achieved through a software like JPPF, and its role is to start a job, divide it into multiple subtasks that can be performed concurrently on multiple computers, reassemble the results in the correct order before presenting the end result.[/list:o]
  In your situation, I understand that you have to process many large graphic files. This is indeed a situation where you could use two or more computers to make this work faster. Here, the simplest division of work would be at the graphic file level, and you could have multiple files processed at the same time, as opposed to having the processing of one file distributed among several machines, which is much, much more complex to achieve. There are, however, a number of prerequisites before you can do that using a software like JPPF:
  
  • The work on each graphic file should be automatable, meaning that it should be possible to gather a set of instructions for Phostoshop to perform on the file, and to run Photoshop with these instructions, without intervention from a user (that's you). From what I have read on Adobe's web site, this seems well within our realm of possibilities.
    
  • The software has to be able to run Photoshop by itself. JPPF does not do that out-of-the-box, however I believe this represents a small amount of work for an average programmer. So here the issue is that it requires some amount of programming, albeit a small one.
  I hope this answers your questions. If you have any further inquires, feel free to express them in theses forums, we'll be happy to help.
  
  -Laurent