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

Randall Hand randall.hand at gmail.com
Mon Aug 7 17:18:42 EDT 2006 

Ahh, I forgot about the Power of 2 thing, that does explain it. Also, glad
to hear it was accepted.. Woohoo! :)

As for the Data, that's what I did actually.  The original files were a PLY
and a Legacy VTK.  I loaded them, painfully, and applied D3 + Extract
Surface, then saved them back as PVTP's.  So when I said the files were
"load balanced", that's what I meant (they had been D3's & saved back in
parallel).

Is there any "preferred" implementation of MPI?  We're using openMPI 1.0.1here.

On 8/7/06, Wylie, Brian <bnwylie at sandia.gov> wrote:
>
>  I wanted to interject a general comment.
>
> D3 is a 'heavy weight' load balancing filter. It's really intended for
> unstructured data and, right now, it will take vtkPolydata and turn it to
> vtkUnstructuredGrid.
>
> You might just want to run it once, right after the reader, and then run
> 'Extract Surface' to get back to vtkPolyData. You also might play with the
> immediate mode and t-strip options to see if they make a big diff on your
> rendering times.
>
> Also, if your dataset has lots of files, you should see how it runs
> without D3 at all, just for comparison. :)
>
>
>   Brian Wylie - Org 1424
>   Sandia National Laboratories
>   MS 0822 - Building 880/A1-J
>   (505)844-2238 FAX(505)845-0833
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>    /_/    \__,_/_/   \__,_/
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>                                     Unleash the Beast
>
>
>  ------------------------------
> *From:* paraview-bounces+bnwylie=sandia.gov at paraview.org [mailto:
> paraview-bounces+bnwylie=sandia.gov at paraview.org] *On Behalf Of *Moreland,
> Kenneth
> *Sent:* Monday, August 07, 2006 3:01 PM
> *To:* Randall Hand; Paraview List
> *Subject:* RE: [Paraview] Even more Questions about ParaView on a Tiled
> Display
>
>
>    1. I just finished incorporating your patch.  Because it's late, I'm
>    going to wait until tomorrow to check it in.
>
>
>
> 1. There are two reasons that your memory usage is varying.  First, it is
> true that the memory is not freed-up from the Cut operation.  The same is
> true of the data between reader and the first D3.  Second, if the number of
> processes you have is not a power of 2, than D3 is not perfect at
> distributing your data.  You can have up to twice as much data on one node
> as the other.
>
>
>
> 2. It does seem strange that one would be so different than the other 12.
> I don't have a good explanation for that.
>
>
>
> 3. I'm guess that has to do with your MPI implementation.  It looks like
> it forks a couple of times.  I notice that of the 3 processes, only one is
> running.  The other 2 may be parents that have forked and are now waiting
> (perhaps as a precaution in case the MPI job crashes and needs to be shut
> down cleanly).
>
>
>
> 4. That sounds like a glitch.  Go ahead and submit a bug report.
>
>
>
> -Ken
>
>
>   ------------------------------
>
> *From:* paraview-bounces+kmorel=sandia.gov at paraview.org [mailto:
> paraview-bounces+kmorel=sandia.gov at paraview.org] *On Behalf Of *Randall
> Hand
> *Sent:* Monday, August 07, 2006 2:28 PM
> *To:* Paraview List
> *Subject:* [Paraview] Even more Questions about ParaView on a Tiled
> Display
>
>
>
> 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
> 1.8G to 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 25.0275:25   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 24.5275:22   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 41.7275:20   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* 2.4.4release, not my customized mullion-enabled one)
> --
> ----------------------------------------
> Randall Hand
> Visualization Scientist
> ERDC MSRC-ITL
>



-- 
----------------------------------------
Randall Hand
Visualization Scientist
ERDC MSRC-ITL
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