[Paraview] Sorry for the 2 previous posts (this is the one)

[Amy Henderson]

At 08:00 AM 9/27/2004, Nick Franklin wrote:
>Sorry for the two previous posts I am new to the forum and it took me 2
>tries before I realized I needed to turn on plain text.
>
>Paraview - render-server/data-server
>
>I have a few questions regarding Paraview and the way it works in
>client/server mode.
>
>My overall goal is to setup Paraview to distribute the data calculations
>(e.g. filters, manipulation of large data sets, etc) and the rendering of
>our data across a cluster of linux boxes.
>
>I will start with what I have done:  I have configured Paraview with MPI for
>linux (RH 9.1) and Windows.  I have configured a setup wherebye I run
>Paraview in server mode and it distributes to 6 nodes.  Here is the command
>I am using:  mpirun -np 6 -p4ssport xxxx paraview --server
>
>The -p4ssport bit is a way of bypassing potential ssh problems that could
>come up.  It simply uses mpich's secure server to run shell commands on
>other servers, the only dissadvantate (I think) is that I have to manually
>key in the passwords for each node everytime I start a Paraview server.
>
>So.the server starts.I type in the password for each node and then it says
>"waiting for client on port 11111" and instances of paraview popup in the
>system monitor on each linux node.
>
>I then connect to the server using the command: paraview --client  the
>client connects successfully and all seems well and good.  I make a
>ridiculously large sphere on the client and the system monitor on all the
>nodes start to wizz up to 100%.  Then 6 tiles appear on the server machine
>containing 6 slices of sphere.  Then the final sphere appears on the client
>machine.
>
>So.what is happening here???  Is the rendering of the sphere being
>distributed or is the data generation of the sphere being distributed.

The data generation of the sphere is being distributed. Since the sphere 
you mention is high-resolution, it is likely that rendering is also being 
distributed, and that the resulting images are then collected together to 
be displayed on the client. The Composite slider on the General tab of the 
3D View Properties page (View menu, 3D View Properties entry) determines 
whether the rendering is distributed or not. If the model is larger than 
the size listed on the slider, rendering will be distributed; otherwise it 
will not.

>Does paraview supportdistributed data manipulation (eg, If I wanted to
>extract edges on a very high polygon shape would it distribute the
>calculation of doing this).  Or does it only allow distributed rendering of
>the data once it has been manipulated on a single machine?

It does both. One of the main points of ParaView is to have distributed 
processing of the data (including rendering) and to collect the results as 
late as possible (i.e., after each process has rendered its piece of the data).


>I have tried to set up a data and render server and then connect using the
>-crs argument and it does work but only the nodes of the render server do
>anything and the data-server nodes (the nodes started with the command
>--server) don't appear to be doing anything.  But the rendernodes started by
>the -render-server command seem to at least have some activity.

In this case, the data processing should be happening on the data server 
nodes, the rendering should occur on the render server nodes, and the 
results should be collected to and displayed on the client. Example 
command-line for setting up ParaView in this way are shown below:

mpirun -np N paraview --render-server --machines=machine_file
mpirun -np M paraview --server
paraview -crs --host=data_server_host --render-server-host=render_server_host

The number of machines N (# of machines in the render server) should be no 
larger than the number of machines M (# of machines in the data server). 
The machine_file lists the machines composing the render server. An example 
is shown below.

node 0 machine1
node 1 machine2
node 2 machine3

When you run with a data server and a render server, do the various servers 
and the client seem to connect properly? If you load a large data set in 
this mode and apply some filters to it, do you see activity both on the 
data server and on the render server?

- Amy

>Could anyone please shed light on how exactly Paraview works in this way.
>
>Is there some classic way of doing what I am trying todo?  How are others
>doing this?
>
>Also if anyone is interested in instructions on compiling Paraview with MPI
>on RH Linux 9.1 let me know because it seems that there might be demand for
>this looking through the discussion groups.
>
>The setup I am using is a 6 node (to begin with), Athlon 64 3000 each with
>0.5gb of ram and all running RH 9.1.  As the client machine I am using a
>windows Pentium 4 system.  The version of Paraview is 1.6.1 and it is
>compiled with MPICH 1.x.x.
>
>Any help would be great.
>
>Regards
>
>Nick
>
>---------------------------------
>
>Nick Franklin
>
>Email:  nickfzx at aol.com <mailto:nickfzx at aol.com>
>
>Tel: 415 640 3124
>
>---------------------------------
>
>
>
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