[Paraview] stability of paraview

[Scott, W Alan]

ParaView DOES compile for some 64 bit platforms.  I compile it for SGI
and IA-64 based machines all of the time.  One of the known stable 64
bit platforms is Intel Xeon 64 bit chips.

As stated, unless you are pushing the limits of the tool (thousands of
processors, files over dozens or hundreds of gigabytes in size, not
enough swap space, etc), ParaView is as stable as any of the
alternatives.  And free means that I can install it on my laptop at
home!

Alan

--------------------------------------------------------
W. Alan Scott
ParaView Support Manager

Sandia National Laboratories
---------------------------------------------------------


-----Original Message-----
From: paraview-bounces+wascott=sandia.gov at paraview.org
[mailto:paraview-bounces+wascott=sandia.gov at paraview.org] On Behalf Of
SamuelKey
Sent: Monday, June 12, 2006 7:41 PM
To: peter.j.bismuti at boeing.com
Cc: paraview at paraview.org
Subject: Re: [Paraview] stability of paraview

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
> _______________________________________________
> ParaView mailing list
> ParaView at paraview.org
> http://www.paraview.org/mailman/listinfo/paraview
>
>
>   

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