[Paraview] how to run ParaView 3.4.0 on MacOS Leopard in parallel?

[Berk Geveci]

Hi Karen,

What file format are you using?

There are a few factors here. First, we have to make sure that the
file format you are using is suitable for parallel processing - not
all formats are. Second, if you are using a GPU based algorithm such
as projected tetrahedra (which is the default), you are likely to see
a decrease in performance of volume rendering rather than increase.
This is because all of the processes will be using 1 GPU and the
resource contention that this causes is likely to make rendering
slower. Assuming that the data is distributed properly, algorithms
should run faster though. If you have multiple GPUs, it is also
possible to make rendering scale to an extent but we haven't
experimented with multiple GPU on one machine yet.

-berk

On Fri, Jul 3, 2009 at 4:55 PM, Karen Lee<kylkaren at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi, thanks for all of your responses.  It looks like the ParaView Guide book
> is out-of-date, as it tells you that the client can be launched directly
> with "mpirun -np <xx> paraview" as an alternative to running pvserver
> separately.
>
> Now that we are using pvserver, it is partially working.
>
> We installed pvserver (in /usr/local/bin), and then used the "Connect"
> option in the File menu to connect to a server running on "localhost" (Add
> Server, then specifying Client/Server connecting to localhost port 11111,
> launching pvserver with "/usr/bin/mpirun -np 7 /usr/local/bin/pvserver"),
> and connected to the server successfully.
>
> Unfortunately, using pvserver on the same (8-processor) machine seems to be
> significantly slower and more buggy than running the client by itself (we
> tried -np 7, and also -np 2), for a fairly large (million-point)
> unstructured-grid dataset that takes about 20 seconds for volume rendering
> with one processor.  We had thought that this problem would be big enough to
> benefit from at least using a couple of CPUs.
>
> When we connect to pvserver on the same machine, it not only takes much
> longer to render (regardless of the number of CPUs we launch pvserver on),
> but there are also some weird screen artifacts where it seems to open up a
> second rendering window (with no controls or window decorations, just a
> square with a duplicate of the rendering contents) that we cannot get rid
> of.  At that point the program freezes.
>
> Any suggestions?  We are using the precompiled paraview 3.4.0 from the
> paraview web site, compiled for MacOS Leopard/Intel, running on an 8-cpu
> MacPro with 16GB of RAM.
>
> Thanks,
> Karen Lee
>
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