[Paraview] stability of paraview

[SamuelKey]

Peter,

I have been using ParaView for about two years now. Version 2.4.3 is 
worthy of your consideration. Your question suggests to me that you are 
concerned that ParaView is the product of hobbyists and backwoods 
programmers. Kitware does a lot of work on ParaView through funding from 
Sanadia National Laboratories, Las Alamos National Laboratory, Livermore 
National Laboratory, and the US Army Research Laboratory. It was these 
funding sources that required that ParaView be made open source.  There 
are a number of programmers at these institutions that are also 
contribute to ParaView. There are a number of contributors from the NSF 
High Performance Computing centers, and comparable centers in Europe. If 
you watch the  ParaView mailing list. You will find their exchanges with 
the Kitware staff occurring at a very high level.

I have used ParaView on Windows2K/x86-32(HP x4000), WindowsXp/AMD64, 
Suse AMD64Linux v9.3 on a Sun W2100z. I have always used pre-compiled 
downloads from Kitware. My workstations have rather capable Nvidia 
graphics cards, and 1GB
/4GB RAM, respectively.

The one real limitation I have encountered is that ParaView is compiled 
for 32-bit computer architectures and on my Sun system I have 
experienced crashes on both O/S's when ParaView's memory footprint 
exceeds 2GB, but then I use animations a lot (100 time steps from a 860K 
finite element models with plenty of point and cell data).  I am looking 
forward to the return of proper 64-bit operating systems and 
applications  --  something we left behind when we failed to support the 
DEC Alpha/True64 Unix systems and their associated compilers.

However, ParaView  is intended for datasets coming from massively 
parallel executions -- 1000's of processors. You of course need the 
computing hardware, reliable data storage, reliable rendering farms and 
reliable high-bandwidth net works to pull this off.

Graphics has always been resource intensive and if you take an ordinary 
PC with a badly fragmented file system (the normal state for Windows 
systems without proactive management); a badly fragmented, too-small 
page file; and too little RAM; ParaView with an interesting data set can 
easily overwhelm one of these PC's. The OS just drops dead. I don't 
consider this ParaView's fault.

Hope this helps with your survey.

Sam Key

Peter J. Bismuti wrote:
> Hi, here at Boeing we're contemplating using Paraview as one tool for 
> visualizing solutions from an in-house CFD code (Navier-Stokes). There is 
> concern that an open-source produce won't have an acceptable level of QA.  
> There have been some reports of frequent crashes.  Anybody care to share 
> their experiences or opinions?  
>
> Thanks
> Peter Bismuti
> Boeing
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