What is HTTPov?
HTTPov is a system intended for distributing POV-Ray rendering. It consists of one central server and at least one client, fetching render batches from the server via HTTP, and delivering them back the same way. It strives to have as few requirements as possible, in order to make it effortless to deploy. It is free, licensed under the GPL, and comes with full source code. The client is a bash script, and the server is a PHP one.
The system was primarily designed to render animations, but is just as capable of distributing slices of a single image to the clients as well.
The client is designed to work with a default installation of POV-Ray 3.6, and works under, tested so far, Linux, NetBSD and Cygwin. OS X compatibility is not well tested. As POV-Ray 3.6 isn't SMP capable, one client will just use one core or CPU, but if you run one client per available core/CPU, they will use them all.
POV-Ray 3.7 works with HTTPov, too, but is SMP capable, and will use all CPUs/cores on a single machine. For rendering on several machines in parallel, HTTPov will still be useful.
Client requirements:
The following applications are normally distributed with Linux, and can be added to Windows through Cygwin.
Server requirements:
The server was developed on a CentOS 4 machine, and has not been tested under Windows.