[Paraview] Compositing

[Terry Jordan]

The problem we have is that the data is starting to hit the theshold of what 
a single workstation can handle, so we are trying to setup a small vis 
cluster to allow us to look at larger data.  Some of the data can be 
aninated and I am trying to allow the animation to run as smoothly as 
possible while using parallel paraview.  It just seemed to me that the first 
node, the one you launch the mpi pvserver from seems to be doing more work 
than all the other nodes and I thought it would balance out the workload a 
little if one machine did the compositing alone and not have a chunk of its 
own it needed to render.  So in our case we have 6 nodes I want to run mpi 
pvserver on and 1 node to run the client.  of those 6 nodes I figured we 
could have 5 pcs rendering chunks and one compositing the chunks and 
squirting it to the client.

----Original Message Follows----
From: "Moreland, Kenneth" <kmorel at sandia.gov>
To: "Terry Jordan" <tejj at hotmail.com>, paraview at paraview.org
Subject: RE: [Paraview] Compositing
Date: Tue, 21 Mar 2006 09:43:03 -0700

If there is not much difference between your server nodes and client,
you can very easily move all the geometry to the client and render
locally.  In "3D View Properties" under "LOD Parameters" there is an
entry titled "Composite."  That entry has a slider bar that represents
the threshold at which geometry is moved to the client.  If necessary,
you can move that slider to the right so that it collects bigger
geometries.  You can also unclick the box to turn off compositing
altogether and always collect polygons.  This will backfire on you,
however, if you are rendering a large quantity of data.

If you really want the geometry to be collected on one of the server
nodes, you will have to run in client/render server/data server mode.
Make the data server span all 6 machines and the render server reside on
one of them.  It should be OK to have a render server and data server
share a node so long as memory is not a problem.  This configuration
will force all the geometry to be pushed to the single render server
node where it will be rendered and delivered to the client.

Performance-wise is this a good idea?  That depends on your system
configuration.  Unless your server rendering hardware is way faster than
your client and your cluster interconnect really sucks, then probably
not.  I recommend experimenting with the "Composite" and "Subsample
Rate" options first to try to find a good compromise amongst rendering
speed, image quality, and data management.

-Ken

 > -----Original Message-----
 > From: paraview-bounces+kmorel=sandia.gov at paraview.org
 > [mailto:paraview-bounces+kmorel=sandia.gov at paraview.org] On
 > Behalf Of Terry Jordan
 > Sent: Tuesday, March 21, 2006 9:03 AM
 > To: paraview at paraview.org
 > Subject: [Paraview] Compositing
 >
 > I am running paraview (pvserver) using MPI on 6 machines (a
 > small rendering or vis cluster) and piping it back to a
 > single display using pvclient.  I am wondering if I can
 > specifiy one pc to only do the compositing.  So instead of
 > one pc rendering a portion of the data and compositing, one
 > could just composite.  Is this feasible and performance-wise
 > would it be a good idea?
 >
 > Thanks in advance.
 >
 >
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 > ParaView at paraview.org
 > http://www.paraview.org/mailman/listinfo/paraview
 >
 >

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