[Paraview] Newbie question about paraview's parallel visualization procedure

[Raashid Baig]

I am a newbie to parallel visualization and ParaView in general, I
have some doubts which may be very fundamental.  

I am using ParaView2.6.X and trying to do some performance analysis
and dataset limit of ParaView in general as a part of an academic
project. I want to see what are the gains in CPU & memory usage and
time required to render a particular dataset when ParaView is run in
parallel. All machines are Intel Core Duo 2, 2GB DDR2 RAM, and 2GB
swap, all machines have NVidia 7series graphics cards and have
Debian/Ubuntu Linux

I have structured data-sets with point attributes in form of VTK
legacy files.  When I run paraview in stand-alone mode on a single
machine, I am able to draw 5 iso-surface for structured grid datasets
upto 5 million points. But when I put the same VTK legacy files on 3
different computers (all have ParaView 2.6.X installed) and run
ParaView through LAM/MPI in distributed stand alone mode (as described
in the ParaView book) on these 3 machines, the performance decreases
for the isosurface case. Not only does the time taken to render final
image, cpu/memory usage increase, I am only able to visualize till 1
million grid points. After 1 million point the get an error (this
particular error is for a dataset of 2 million) :

raashid at ged:~/src/cvs/paraview-unix/bin$ mpirun -np 3 -x DISPLAY=10.101.11.71:0.0 ./paraview
ErrorMessage
# Error or warning: There was a VTK Error in file: /home/raashid/src/cvs/ParaView/VTK/Common/vtkDataArrayTemplate.txx (266)
 vtkIdTypeArray (0xe041768): Unable to allocate 59135376 elements of size 4 bytes.
ErrorMessage end
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
One of the processes started by mpirun has exited with a nonzero exit
code.  This typically indicates that the process finished in error.
If your process did not finish in error, be sure to include a "return
0" or "exit(0)" in your C code before exiting the application.

PID 16283 failed on node n0 (10.101.11.71) due to signal 11.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

I get the same error as above if I use a D3 filter before applying the
iso-contour.


Following the ideas of a technical report I tried to open the VTK
legacy file when ParaView server was running on 3 different computers
and the client was running on a different computer, apply the D3
filter and then save the file as PVTK unstructured grid format
(*.pvtu, with 1 ghost levels), close the paraview, start a fresh
paraview session with the same configuration (ParaView server was
running on 3 different computers and the client was running on a
different computer) load the master *.pvtu file and do the same
iso-contour example as above, the server again crashes and displays
the following error.(this particular error is for 2.5 million grid
points)

On the server side I get the message :
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
raashid at ender:~/src/cvs/paraview-unix/bin$ mpirun -np 3 -x DISPLAY=10.101.11.71:0.0 ./pvserver
Listen on port: 11111
Waiting for client...
Client connected.
Process id: 0 >> ERROR: In /home/raashid/src/cvs/ParaView/VTK/Common/vtkDataArrayTemplate.txx, line 95
vtkIdTypeArray (0xd243258): Unable to allocate 75216436 elements of size 4 bytes.

Process id: 0 >> ERROR: In /home/raashid/src/cvs/ParaView/Servers/Common/vtkProcessModule.cxx, line 1187
vtkProcessModule (0xb395560): Exception: Insufficient memory exception.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

On the client side I get the message
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
raashid at ged:~/src/cvs/paraview-unix/bin$ ./pvclient --server-host=10.101.11.72
Connected to server
ErrorMessage
# Error or warning: There was a VTK Error in file: /home/raashid/src/cvs/ParaView/Servers/Common/vtkProcessModule.cxx (1171)
 vtkProcessModule (0xc0c7530): Received exception from server: Insufficient memory exception.
ErrorMessage end
ErrorMessage
# Error or warning: There was a VTK Error in file: /home/raashid/src/cvs/ParaView/Servers/Common/vtkServerConnection.cxx (67)
 vtkServerConnection (0xc0ee1b8): Server Connection Closed!
ErrorMessage end
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Am I using the wrong file type, if yes what should I use ?  
Is there some threshold limit I am violating ?

Please help me with this problem, because I am in serious trouble.
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