[Paraview-developers] SMP idea

[David E DeMarle]

I had the idea yesterday that we could, in addition to delivering MPI
with paraview, use the vtkTransmitX filters transparently to mitigate
I/O contention.

Those filters send subdomains via MPI from a root node to satellite
nodes so that only the root needs to do file I/O. That organization
would prevent oversubscribing the serial disk IO bottleneck on
commodity multiprocessor workstations while still allowing
computational parallelism. We could hide this all at the proxy layer
in paraview. The user would just see a checkbox in the GUI and when on
the TransmitX filters get inserted transparently after the reader.

For modern clusters with SMP nodes we would have a hierarchy with one
process doing I/O on each node, delivering data only to the sibling
processes on the same node.

Something analogous might be done on the rendering end too for the
serial GPU bottleneck or we could simple use the renderserver
component to do it.

David E DeMarle
Kitware, Inc.
R&D Engineer
28 Corporate Drive
Clifton Park, NY 12065-8662
Phone: 518-371-3971 x109