[Paraview] VTK Error: vtkIdTypeArray: St9 bad_alloc

[Adam Gray]

Hello, everyone.
We are using paraview on a number of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 machine (all are roughly Intel Xeon, 4GB of RAM, nVidia Quadro video card). When we open a spcth file and try to fiddle around with it, we get the following error near the last timesteps of our problem.

ErrorMessage
# Error or warning: There was a VTK Error in file: /home/amy/ParaViewReleaseRoot /paraview-2.4.3/VTK/Common/vtkDataArrayTemplate.txx (105)
 vtkIdTypeArray (0xfa744340): Unable to allocate 1856028 elements of size 4: St9 bad_alloc
ErrorMessage end
ErrorMessage
# Error or warning: There was a VTK Error in file: /home/amy/ParaViewReleaseRoot /paraview-2.4.3/VTK/Common/vtkDataArrayTemplate.txx (241)
 vtkIdTypeArray (0x5cc00b40): Unable to allocate 1872506 elements of size 4: St9 bad_alloc
ErrorMessage end
Segmentation fault

The way we get this is as follows... Open a 5GB spcth problem, extract the parts as desired, and play the sequence. Watch the total memory fill up, and watch paraview quit with the above error.

All of the spcth.# files add up to 5GB, so we fear this is a memory issue. If it is, or is not, could running paraview in parallel possibly help our situation at all? Or are we mostly stuck cramming more RAM into a machine?

Thank you in advance for any help.

Adam Gray
graya at battelle.org