[Paraview] Documentation for Paraview Distributed Options?

[Jeremy Stout]

After resolving yesterday's issue, I'm moving on and trying to figure
out how to use Paraview on my organization's computer cluster. I've
been looking through the 1.4 User's Guide at the different options
that can be given on the commandline. Unfortunately, some of the
explanations for the options I am interested in are sparser than what
I would like.

Before I go any farther, let me briefly explain my computer cluster
setup. It consists of one main node and 20+ computation nodes. The
main node has Internet access and is primarily used to submit jobs to
the cluster. The computation nodes can communicate with the main node
and each other. MPI is used to provide parallel support.

I'm primarily interested in using my computer cluster for rendering
work. I'm thinking that I will have to setup one of the computation
nodes as a render server and have the other nodes connect to it. I
would then have the server and client run on the main node.

Looking through the options for the program, I am not sure how to make
this happen. So, let me ask the following questions:

1.  If I want to run the rendering process on 4 nodes, what options
would I use to do that? Do I have to tell one node to be a "render
server" and the others to be a "render node" that connects to the
render server? In the user's guide, I saw mention of a "machine file,"
but I didn't see any mention made for the format of the file or how it
was supposed to be used.

2.  Going through the mail archives, I saw mention of support being
integrated for a render server/server/client mode. What would be the
options for the client to connect if the servers are running on
different machines? It seems like "host" only lets you specify the
server you are connecting to.

Any help that can be offered would be appreciated.

Jeremy Stout