Strange problem with CS-12 (running Wavefront)

[R. Munroe]

I hope someone might be able to help me with a strange problem we are having
with our CS-12 (headless 4D/70).

A couple of nights ago, one of our animators was running an overnight
rendering job (using Wavefront).  Halfway through the night the render
crashed - the system message said that it was a bus error.  Nothing
strange there - we have had many of those in the past and everything  normally
continues along smoothly.  This time, however, we can no longer run
Wavefront's renderer or any of Wavefront's utilities that have anything
to do with rendered images (imf_comp, plot, tex_bld_2D, etc.).  The weirdest
part of all this is that nothing complains - the hardware, the software, the
system software all think everything is peachy.

For example, when Wavefront's renderer (image) renders a picture it reads
an animation (preview) file for all of the lighting, geometry, and camera info.
Based on that information, as well as a couple of other command line options,
image calculates the picture resolution and renders away.  Since our crash,
image loads the preview file but renders only the last pixel of the last
scan line!  Plot, which should create a 2D plot file from a preview file,
inserts NaN (not a number) in place of the expected vertices.  If we use
imf_comp to make a straight copy of an existing picture,  the only thing
that gets stored in the new picture is the matte channel.  Tex_bld_2D is the
only program that actually crashes.  Running dbx on the core tells me that
it pooped out at a program control statement (pc 0x602468) and there was
a bus error.

As you can see, this is a tough problem to fix because both the workstation
and Wavefront's software are not seeing any problems.  We have tried the same 
operations on our other workstations - using the same preview file - with
absolutely no trouble.  I have, in order, rebuilt Wavefront's binaries, removed
the Wavefront directory and re-installed the software, and cleaned off the
hard disk and re-installed the system software.  No luck.  If anyone has had
a similar problem and/or knows what could be causing this problem, I sure
would appreciate hearing from you.  So far SGI and Wavefront are both stumped.


Thanks,

Bob Munroe
TOPIX Computer Graphics and Animation, Inc.
topix at utcs.utoronto.ca