[Paraview] ParaView 4.0.1 Opacity performance (UNCLASSIFIED)

[Biddiscombe, John A.]

Rick

I also had many problems working with transparency using paraview. My case was probably slightly different as the data is completely unstructured (I'm not familiar with CTH datasets), and the partitioning code in paraview was taking very long and executing repeatedly.

I'd like to write a long email to describe the work I've been doing on transparency for our meshes.... but 
There is a section in this paper "Juan Hernando, John Biddiscombe, Bidur Bohara, Stefan Eilemann, Felix Schürmann: Practical Parallel Rendering of Detailed Neuron Simulations. EGPGV 2013: 49-56"
ftp://ftp.cscs.ch/out/biddisco/bbp/neurons-egpgv13.pdf
which describes the changes/plugins to paraview. Space was scarce so the writeup of the paraview part is not enough, but might give you a good overview of the work.

Most of the partitioning and fast rendering on GPU is available (albeit in experimental form) in the pv-zoltan plugin from here https://hpcforge.org/projects/pv-zoltan/ 

Feel free to ask questions if this might help you in your work.

JB

> -----Original Message-----
> From: paraview-bounces at paraview.org [mailto:paraview-
> bounces at paraview.org] On Behalf Of Angelini, Richard C (Rick) CIV USARMY
> ARL (US)
> Sent: 11 September 2013 17:15
> To: ParaView at paraview.org
> Subject: [Paraview] ParaView 4.0.1 Opacity performance (UNCLASSIFIED)
> 
> Classification: UNCLASSIFIED
> Caveats: NONE
> 
> I am working on a CTH dataset with 1024 spcth files.    I'm able to extract
> 8 CTH parts using the "CTH Extract Parts" filter and things work reasonably
> well.  In client-server mode, I'm able to interact with the data, rotate,
> translate, scale, etc without any noticeable performance issues.   By
> default, I have distributed rendering enabled and the interactive
> performance is good.
> 
> However, if I enable opacity on any of those CTH parts that I extract,
> interactive performance drops to the point of being unusable.     Once
> enabled, it takes about 10 minutes for ParaView to update the GL window.
> I've tried diddling with the render window settings - such totally disabling
> distributed rendering, but it doesn't seem to make any difference on the
> performance with opacity.
> 
> I've also saved out animations of this dataset and use the "disconnect"
> feature.    Without opacity enabled, I can march through time at something
> slightly less than 1 timestep/minute running in disconnected batch mode.
> With opacity enabled on any one of the parts,  it takes ~10
> minutes/timestep.
> 
> On the server side, I have paraview 4.0.1 built with the OSMesa library
> that's downloaded as part of the superbuild.    I'm assuming that opacity
> should not totally destroy performance as we're seeing.     There are other
> packages that we use in client-server mode with opacity that show no
> noticeable performance degradation when using opacity.
> 
> Thanks
> ________________________________
> 
> Rick Angelini
> USArmy Research Laboratory
> CISD/HPC Architectures Team
> Building 120 Cube 315
> Phone:  410-278-6266
> 
> Classification: UNCLASSIFIED
> Caveats: NONE
>