[Paraview] Opening PVD Files Referencing Thousands of Files

[Kent Eschenberg]

This message includes a fix for the problem described below. If you are using 2.4.4 you could simply replace <source>/Servers/Filters/vtkXMLCollectionReader.cxx with the attachment.

Kent
Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center


$ diff vtkXMLCollectionReader.cxx vtkXMLCollectionReader_original.cxx
1,2d0
< /* Modified to Work Better wtih Many Input Files   CMU/PSC/KEE 11/20/2006 */
<
308,317d305
<   int restrictFlag = ( this->Internal->Restrictions.size() ) == 0;
<   if( restrictFlag ) {
<      if( this->GetAttributeIndex("timestep") >= 0 ) {
<         this->SetRestriction( "timestep", "0" );
<      }
<      else {
<         restrictFlag = 0;
<      }
<   }
<
367d354
<   if( restrictFlag ) this->SetRestriction( "timestep", 0 );


On 11/15/06, Kent Eschenberg <eschenbe at psc.edu> wrote:
> If one has a parallel application using 512 processors to generate 100 time
> steps it seems like a good idea to use the pvd file format where each
> processor can write one file per time step. This creates 51,201 files.
> 
> When the pvd file is opened it seems that ParaView tries to read all of the
> files and generate output (from vtkPVDReader) that includes the contents of
> every file. As you might guess, this takes a very long time. Is this an
> error or was the pvd format not designed for so many files?
> 
> I've altered our version to temporarily add the "restriction" that the
> timestep must be 0 when the reader sees that there are no other
> restrictions. As a result, when the file is first opened, it generates
> output from only timestep 0. Later, as one animates through the time steps,
> the animator adds a restriction for just the needed time.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: vtkXMLCollectionReader.cxx
Type: application/octet-stream
Size: 24298 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://public.kitware.com/pipermail/paraview/attachments/20061130/df01bf81/vtkXMLCollectionReader-0001.obj