<div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_extra"><div class="gmail_quote"><div>Hi Zhang,<br> <br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><p><font color="#333333"><font face="Arial">It is true that previously in my case the I/O operation took most of the time. My files are txt files. After received your reply, I generated a series of binary dataset files and had a try rendering them. I did'n record the exact rendering time but I can feel it was far more faster than the previous txt files. </font></font></p></blockquote><div>I suspected as much. The text output files are easier to look at since you can open them and visually verify them but they are much more costly to process. Binary formats will almost always be more performant. <br><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><p><font color="#333333"><font face="Arial">As I'm going to use Catalyst, I think my final large dataset could be rendered in an acceptable frame rate if I could set up the Catalyst successfully.</font></font></p></blockquote><div>5M points is a pretty small dataset so I doubt you'd be render bound if you can use a GPU. A modern NVidia GPU can easily do several hundred million triangles / sec. Even a CPU based render can easily crank out several million triangles per second. Moving to 5.2 will help substantially in render performance. WRT parallel rendering and Catalyst, if you're code is MPI based then you'll automatically get parallel rendering since Catalyst runs in the same process as the simulation code.<br></div> <br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><p><font color="#333333"><font face="Arial">But I'm really a newbie and so far I have not mastered Python so that I have to use the paraview GUI. What I mean in the words "rendering time" is actually the time between when I click the "display" button on the VCR Controls toolbar and when all the frames are finished (Er, I measured it using my mobile phone...).</font></font></p></blockquote>A helpful tool in thh ParaView GUI for performing timing is the "Timer Log" feature. To use it, open "Tools -> Timer Log", then select [Clear]. Now do some operation and select [Refresh]. In this case, you can open the data file, clear the timer, play the series, then refresh the timer. You should see something like this:<br></div><div class="gmail_quote"><span style="font-family:monospace,monospace"><br></span><div style="margin-left:40px"><span style="font-family:monospace,monospace">
</span></div><p style="margin:0px 0px 0px 40px;text-indent:0px"><span style="font-family:monospace,monospace">...</span></p><p style="margin:0px 0px 0px 40px;text-indent:0px"><span style="font-family:monospace,monospace">RenderView::Update, 2.37109 seconds</span></p><div style="margin-left:40px"><span style="font-family:monospace,monospace">
</span></div><pre style="margin:0px 0px 0px 40px;text-indent:0px"><span style="font-family:monospace,monospace"> vtkPVView::Update, 2.37103 seconds</span></pre><div style="margin-left:40px"><span style="font-family:monospace,monospace">
</span></div><pre style="margin:0px 0px 0px 40px;text-indent:0px"><b><span style="font-family:monospace,monospace"> Execute vtkFileSeriesReader id: 4778, 1.52852 seconds</span></b></pre><div style="margin-left:40px"><span style="font-family:monospace,monospace">
</span></div><pre style="margin:0px 0px 0px 40px;text-indent:0px"><span style="font-family:monospace,monospace"> Execute vtkGeometryRepresentationWithF<wbr>a, 0.09836 seconds</span></pre><div style="margin-left:40px"><span style="font-family:monospace,monospace">
</span></div><pre style="margin:0px 0px 0px 40px;text-indent:0px"><span style="font-family:monospace,monospace">XMLPolyDataReader::<wbr>GatherInformation, 0.179643 seconds</span></pre><div style="margin-left:40px"><span style="font-family:monospace,monospace">
</span></div><pre style="margin:0px 0px 0px 40px;text-indent:0px"><b><span style="font-family:monospace,monospace">Still Render, 0.626876 seconds</span></b></pre><div style="margin-left:40px"><span style="font-family:monospace,monospace">
</span></div><pre style="margin:0px 0px 0px 40px;text-indent:0px"><span style="font-family:monospace,monospace"> OpenGL Dev Render, 0.601433 seconds</span></pre><div style="margin-left:40px"><span style="font-family:monospace,monospace">
</span></div><pre style="margin:0px 0px 0px 40px;text-indent:0px"><span style="font-family:monospace,monospace">RenderView::Update, 2.3188 seconds</span></pre><div style="margin-left:40px"><span style="font-family:monospace,monospace">
</span></div><pre style="margin:0px 0px 0px 40px;text-indent:0px"><span style="font-family:monospace,monospace"> vtkPVView::Update, 2.31873 seconds</span></pre><div style="margin-left:40px"><span style="font-family:monospace,monospace">
</span></div><pre style="margin:0px 0px 0px 40px;text-indent:0px"><b><span style="font-family:monospace,monospace"> Execute vtkFileSeriesReader id: 4778, 1.49044 seconds</span></b></pre><div style="margin-left:40px"><span style="font-family:monospace,monospace">
</span></div><pre style="margin:0px 0px 0px 40px;text-indent:0px"><span style="font-family:monospace,monospace"> Execute vtkGeometryRepresentationWithF<wbr>a, 0.097739 seconds</span></pre><div style="margin-left:40px"><span style="font-family:monospace,monospace">
</span></div><pre style="margin:0px 0px 0px 40px;text-indent:0px"><span style="font-family:monospace,monospace">XMLPolyDataReader::<wbr>GatherInformation, 0.178735 seconds</span></pre><div style="margin-left:40px"><span style="font-family:monospace,monospace">
</span></div><pre style="margin:0px 0px 0px 40px;text-indent:0px"><b><span style="font-family:monospace,monospace">Still Render, 0.628595 seconds</span></b></pre><div style="margin-left:40px"><span style="font-family:monospace,monospace">
</span></div><pre style="margin:0px 0px 0px 40px;text-indent:0px"><span style="font-family:"courier new,courier""><span style="font-family:monospace,monospace"> OpenGL Dev Render, 0.603274 seconds<br>...</span><br></span></pre><br></div><div class="gmail_quote">From this you can see the vtkFileSeriesReader times, which is how long it takes to read the data file, and the "Still Render" time, which is how long it takes to actually render the dataset. From this you should be able to see the substantially improves render times in 5.2 vs 4.4<br><br></div><div class="gmail_quote">Ken is also right, however, in that parallel rendering is not likely to help with a dataset this size. It's worth the experiment to get it set up to enable you to use it for larger datasets but the overhead on a single machine may still not give you any speed up.<br></div><div class="gmail_quote"><br></div></div></div>