[Paraview] Problem with visualing large Ensight file - please help me.

[Raashid Baig]

I have a big problem while trying to visualize large multi-block
Unstructured grid dataset which is in the form of ASCII Ensight files.
(16 million cells 2.1GB disk usage).

When I start ParaView(3.1.2, complied on a Linux cluster with OpenMPI)
it starts without any problem, but ParaView fails while trying to load
this file. pvserver crashes when the memory usage on the headnode of
the cluster is about 20% to total available memory. Also on all other
nodes, besides the head node ParaView does not seem to consume any
memory. I have reported the problem on the ParaView mailing list on
15-01-2007.

However when I start the pvserver only on one node, the ParaView loads
the Ensight file without crashing, since the single node does not
sufficiently handle this large amount of data, I tried to save the
loaded data in some other file format using ParaView. But for this
data set only the option of VTK Multi-Block files is available, on
saving that I get 1 .vtm file and 11 separate *.vtu files.

Now when I restart the ParaView on 10 nodes and try loading this vtm
file, it loads properly but all the load(of memory) falls only on the
headnode of the cluster. If I perform any operation (Velocity glyphs
for example) all the load again falls only on headnode of the
cluster, this results in a very slow performance as well as risk of
crashing the entire cluster for memory expensive operations (like
isosurfaces).

According the ParaView Wiki:

"""Currently there are only a few readers that truly work in parallel:
VTK files (not legacy), partitioned legacy VTK files, ParaView data
files, HDF5 files, EnSight master server files, and raw (binary) files
can be read in parallel."""

Now what can I do with the current situation, there is no Ensight
Master-Server/HDF5 writer in VTK. Both VTK-XML and VTK-legacy file
formats don't support the multi-block data and the existing *.vtm file
does not seem to work properly when ParaView runs in parallel mode.

What can be the possible solution for the existing situations, can VTK
be of some help ? Or I have to create a new Parallel Reader for
ParaView.
  
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