[Paraview] running in parallel on OS X

[burlen]

Hi Dan,

Typically the -display command line option is used to specify which GPU 
when there are more than one per host.

In the situation you describe running paraview on a single workstation 
with 1 gpu and 8 cores, both rendering and IO are effectively serialized 
as the server processes concurrently attempt to access the single gpu or 
disk as the case may be. It is true that using OSMesa and the 
--off-screen-rendering flag will get you real parallel software 
rendering. However, comparing 1 process rendering with OSMesa to 1 
process rendering on a gpu, the gpu rendering can be 100s of times 
faster.* So for running on a single workstation your best bet is to 
start off using hardware rendering on the gpu and limit the number of 
server processes to 2 or 4 in order to limit contention for disk and 
gpu. If you find the filters you use run significantly longer than the 
reader or renderer, then you might experiment with more server 
processes. As you do so if rendering becomes the significant bottleneck 
you might experiment with OSMesa.

If you're having performance issues your best bet is to run PV on a cluster.

Burlen

* I don't know if you will have issues because of the ATI card.


Dan Lussier wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I have a question about running in parallel on OS X.  I have built the 
> CVS version of Paraview with MPI such that it can run in parallel.  I 
> am  looking to run it across the CPUs local to my Mac Pro workstation 
> but also want them to share the GPU.
>
> Here is my system config:
>
> Mac Pro
> 2 x quad core Xeon
> 1 x ATI graphics card
>
> In the documentation the recommendation is to use 
> --use-offscreen-rendering -display flags however when I do a pvserver 
> - h I do not even see a -display option and --use-offscreen-rendering 
> is labeled as only applicable to software or mangled Mesa rendering on 
> UNIX.
>
> I am looking to achieve maximum overall speed (rendering + filters) on 
> OS X what options if any should I use for my command to initiate the 
> pvservers ?
>
> Many thanks.
>
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