[Paraview] Even more Questions about ParaView on a Tiled Display

[Randall Hand]

Ok, so I've got my Mullions code (still looking for any comments about that)
working on our RenderWall and I'm noticing some interesting behaviour that
i've got some questions about.

In this cluster, we have 12 nodes + 1 head node, each one connected via a
GeForce 7800GTX to a 1600x1200 LCD Display.  Each node has 2 single-core
Xeon processors Hyperthreaded, for an "effective" 4 cores, and 8G of ram.
All connected via Infiniband.  I've loaded up 2 PVTP datasets:
   a) Dataset A is a 52Million Triangle 24-part surface, RGB per point
   b) Dataset B is a 67Million Triangle 12-part surface, no data per point
(Geometry only)

(Both datasets were load-balanced with Paraview's D3 filter.)

Now when I load them in Paraview, with a Tiled Display, they both load and
I'm able to interact with them beautifully.  119Million Triangles rendered
in 1s (for a still frame).  I applied a cutting plane to one of them, and
then another D3 (to balance the newly cut surface, right?), and the results
are still fabulously interactive.  But a few things i've noticed:
1) Even tho the results are now "load balanced" again (via the D3), my
memory usage is still fairly varying.  I'm seeing numbers ranging from 1.8Gto
3.8G on various nodes.  Is this because the memory isn't really freed-up
from the Cut operation?
2) One of my 12 nodes is basically "idle".  While the other 11 nodes show
runtimes of over 250minutes on the pvserver process, one node shows less
than 5.  Images are visible on all 12 displays.
3) On every node I have 3 processes.  4 I would understand, and 1 I had
expected.  But 3?  It seems one is for the Rendering & MPI work, while the
other 2 are for computations (one has the usual spinlock runtime of
250+minutes, while the others have 0.00).

An example:
[rhand at plasma proc]$ pdsh -a top -b -n1 | grep pvserver | sort
plasma01ib: 18580 rhand     25   0 1969M 1.9G 21052 R    25.0 25.0 275:25
1 pvserver
plasma01ib: 18581 rhand     25   0 1969M 1.9G 21052 S     0.0 25.0   0:00
3 pvserver
plasma01ib: 18582 rhand     25   0 1969M 1.9G 21052 S     0.0 25.0   0:00
3 pvserver
plasma02ib: 18367 rhand     25   0 1926M 1.9G 21052 R    25.0 24.5 275:22
1 pvserver
plasma02ib: 18368 rhand     25   0 1926M 1.9G 21052 S     0.0 24.5   0:00
0 pvserver
plasma02ib: 18369 rhand     25   0 1926M 1.9G 21052 S     0.0 24.5   0:00
0 pvserver
plasma03ib: 18407 rhand     25   0 3268M 3.2G 21052 R    25.2 41.7 275:20
1 pvserver
...(snip)...
plasma11ib: 20771 rhand     25   0 1997M 1.9G 21060 S     0.0 25.4   0:00
3 pvserver
plasma12ib: 18301 rhand     18   0 4161M 4.0G 21164 S     0.0 53.1   6:38
1 pvserver
plasma12ib: 18302 rhand     25   0 4161M 4.0G 21164 S     0.0 53.1   0:00
1 pvserver
plasma12ib: 18303 rhand     25   0 4161M 4.0G 21164 S     0.0 53.1   0:00
1 pvserver


4) While interacting, the 2D Scalar Bar seems to resize/move down to the
display closest the origin (lower-left corner), and then return to it's
desired location when the full-res image is rendered again.  Is this a
glitch, or by design?

So can someone explain to me a bit of what's going on "behind the curtain"?
I've also had no luck chasing down what's going on with the Slow Renderings
&mangled options on tiled Displays (On the production 2.4.4 release, not my
customized mullion-enabled one)
-- 
----------------------------------------
Randall Hand
Visualization Scientist
ERDC MSRC-ITL
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://public.kitware.com/pipermail/paraview/attachments/20060807/c64f4b71/attachment.htm