[Paraview-developers] DisplayCluster + ParaView

[Biddiscombe, John A.]

Colleagues have installed a large tiled display and are running displaycluster from TACC on it.
I've never used a tiled display, with paraview or any other software so I'm not sure what to do.

The out of the box solution is to use -tdx=4 -tdy=3 and set the display env var to point to the correct gpu, but I don't have access to the nodes hosting the wall itself (can't run 6 pvservers on the wall nodes or send X to them) and would like to use the viz cluster to run N pvservers (where N>number of tiles) and send the pixels using the displaycluster API ( see https://github.com/TACC/DisplayCluster ). It essentially allows you to send rectangular blocks of pixels into the final image, so I'd simply want 4x3 regions to send.

I'll therefore need to setup a custom view in paraview and capture pixels to send them. Since the display could conceivably be 1980x1020 X4 X3 pixels, this will mean some very large framebuffers on all nodes -

1)      Has anyone already integrated DisplayCluster into paraview and is there a paraview branch anywhere with developments in?

2)      I do not want to replicate data on each render node, which seems to be considered usual for tiled displays, but is out of the question as far as I'm concerned. Is there a better strategy for handling the display. Is 12 small windows better than 1 very large one for example - I can imagine setting 12 views with a different frustum and pasting them into the final large image, but then perhaps the overhead of managing 12 windows is worse than 1 huge one?) (NB. It's actually 6 windows instead of 12 because 2 displays are driven off each GPU on the wall driver nodes and the x server considers them as one)

Any advice gratefully received. Thanks

JB


--
John Biddiscombe,                        email:biddisco @.at.@ cscs.ch
http://www.cscs.ch/
CSCS, Swiss National Supercomputing Centre  | Tel:  +41 (91) 610.82.07
Via Trevano 131, 6900 Lugano, Switzerland   | Fax:  +41 (91) 610.82.82

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