[Beowulf] Digital Image Processing via HPC/Cluster/Beowulf - Basics

[Lux, Jim (337C)]

Dragging this back to something actually image processing related...

What free (as in beer) software is available these days for doing
rendering and modeling on a cluster.  I've been using POVray for a decade,
and I'm happy with it (as far as a modeling language goes), because what I
want to model is well handled by it (typically, geometries that I have
generated by an algorithm, so it's easy to spit out the POVray primitives
as I generate the geometry in Matlab).

And secondly, what's out there to do image compositing/panorama building.
Say I have a bunch of images of an object taken from different directions
and I want to build a 3-d model of whatever it is.  Automatically matching
the images against each other (as opposed to hand placing them using
something like panotools)

And thirdly, a computationally intensive task.. A sort of 3 D jigsaw
puzzle.. You have images of a bunch of pot sherds, with no guarantee that
it's just one pot, or that any pot is complete, and you want to assemble
the sherds into a virtual pot.  Sort of an image matching problem with
sherd edges, and then a 3D geometry problem.