[Paraview] ANN: ParaView 3.14, Release Candidate 2 Available

[Burlen Loring]

Hi Utkarsh,

(apologies on resending this, first attempt was blocked because attached 
screen shot exceeded 500kB)

Those sound like wonderful additions especially the new transfer 
function editor, I can't wait to start using 3.14!

I want to share some experience re: the memory inspector as I had 
written something similar as a source plugin called the Process Monitor 
a while back (here's a screen shot 
http://www.hpcvis.com/vis/images/pv/process-monitor.png).

In PV's memory inspector panel it would be useful to organize the server 
ranks by host name and display the total memory used on each host by the 
pvservers. This sum is necessary to know how close you are to actually 
running out.

It may also be useful to display memory usage as both absolute and % 
used. The latter would easily enable adding visual ques to the panel 
(eg. row color is changed to red when more than 75% of memory is used on 
an individual host) to warn the user that they are in danger of a crash.

You may want to consider adding an "override" for reporting the amount 
of free ram (and % used) when the server is run on an SMP such as NICS 
Nautilus. Although Nautilus has 4TB of ram, users need to request a 
specific amount of ram per core when submitting a job. The kernel will 
kill the process that uses more than the requested amount, so what the 
system reports as free memory is fairly useless.

An old version of the Process Monitor is in the SciVisToolKit plugin, 
note that mac server side code is not finished so only windows and linux 
servers are currently are handled. The process monitor has a number of 
additional debugging features such as the ability to attach gdb to 
remote servers, and enable backtrace on sig SEGV etc.

You should also double check that the memory used value you report is 
accurate. When I tested the 3.14 binary I noticed that it reports 4G 
used when top reports only using 425m. There may be a bug in your unit 
conversion?

Hope this feedback is useful, I had intended to share this work but just 
haven't had the time to finish the mac implementation. It's great that 
you have added it!
Burlen