[Paraview] Parallel ParaView- file formats and Chromium

[Joel Welling]

Hi folks;
  We are coming up to speed on running ParaView in parallel under MPI, and I 
have a few questions.

1) Can someone send an example of an XML file which will cause ParaView to 
read data in parallel across several processors?  For example, if I have 4 
blocks of data and 4 PEs, I gather I need to produce a .pvd or .pvti file from 
my 4 individual .vti files.  The only example I can find contains a reference 
to only 1 .vti file and my attempts to generalize it seem to be failing.

2) The documentation (1.2.1) stresses that if the DISPLAY environment variable 
is set for all processes, the several workers will all open windows on the 
display, causing problems for the rank 0 worker that is supposed to be 
handling the UI.  Experimentally this doesn't seem to happen- I only get one 
window.  Has the problem with multiple access to the DISPLAY been fixed?

3) The default configuration seems to be for each worker to use Mesa to do its 
own rendering (presumably off-screen), and then to read back the image.  The 
images are then composited by ParaView itself.  We'd like to use Chromium, and 
to let Chromium do the compositing.  I *guess* all that's really needed is to 
keep ParaView from trying to do the compositing.  How does one set this up?

Thanks, I hope;
-Joel
 welling at psc.edu