[Paraview] Rendering in parallel

[Jérémy Santina]

Thank you very much for your help.

As you said, my DISPLAY environment variable is pointing back to my desktop.
The problem now is that I have tried using the option -display for the
command pvserver but apparently it is unknown. Is it normal ? Is there
another way to make sure that the display is set correctly ? I didn't
mention it but my version of Paraview is 4.1.0-RC1-Linux-64bits. I don't
know if it might help.

Jérémy.


2014-07-02 22:34 GMT+02:00 Moreland, Kenneth <kmorel at sandia.gov>:

>  OK, I can see where things are going majorly wrong here. Let's start
> with the worst of the problems.
>
>  I notice on the bottom of your screenshot that your desktop has 4
> windows named ParaView Server #0, ParaView Server #1, etc. Those are X
> windows that the server is opening up on your desktop. You really don't
> want the server to do that. Those windows are used for OpenGL rendering. If
> they are opened on your desktop, that means that all four of those
> processes on your server are sending *all* the geometry to your desktop,
> your desktop renders *all* the geometry, and then the images get shipped
> to the server. The server then composites those images together and sends
> the result *back* to your desktop.
>
>  I'm sure that when you are running the server, your DISPLAY environment
> variable is pointing back to your desktop, which is causing the problem.
> You need to make sure the server is run with display set to localhost:0.
> More information is on the ParaView wiki at:
>
>  http://www.paraview.org/Wiki/Setting_up_a_ParaView_Server#X_Connections
>
>  That said, I'm not sure using your server is going to give you a big
> rendering performance boost over your desktop. The parallel rendering is
> really designed for large clusters with many GPUs. The rendering should
> work OK on your desktop as long as you're not thrashing your virtual memory
> (which is possible).
>
>  -Ken
>
>   From: Jérémy Santina <jeremy.santina at gmail.com>
> Date: Wednesday, July 2, 2014 4:17 AM
>
> To: Kenneth Moreland <kmorel at sandia.gov>
> Cc: "paraview at paraview.org" <paraview at paraview.org>
> Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: [Paraview] Rendering in parallel
>
>   Sorry for my poor description. I will try to give more information.
>
> I am loading a Multi-block Dataset without applying any filters and the
> rendering is surface rendering. In order to understand how it works, I am
> just running a pvserver in parallel on another computer (with a better GPU)
> connected via SSH. The graphics card is an NVIDIA Quadro FX 4600 and you
> have to know that I am not alone using this machine.  Server and client
> both work on Linux. So would the problem be because there is only one GPU ?
>
>  I join a picture with this message.
>
>  I would have another question. When I launch the rendering in parallel,
> a variable called vtkProcessId is generated. What is it ? Does it do the
> same thing if I apply Process Id Scalars filter ? Or are they two different
> things ?
>
>  Jérémy
>
>
> 2014-07-01 18:08 GMT+02:00 Moreland, Kenneth <kmorel at sandia.gov>:
>
>>  To check the distribution of the data, use the Process Id Scalars
>> filters. That should color the data based on which processor it is located.
>>
>>  It might help if you described your system more completely. What kind
>> of data are you loading? Is it image data? Polygon data? AMR? An
>> unstructured grid? Are you applying any filters? How are you rendering it?
>> Is it surface or volume rendering? Is there any transparency? Can you send
>> a picture? What kind of parallel computer are you using? Are you running
>> ParaView on your desktop in multi-core mode (I think rendering actually
>> serializes in that case because you still have only one GPU.), or are you
>> connecting to a cluster? How many nodes on your cluster and how are they
>> configured?
>>
>>  -Ken
>>
>>   From: Jérémy Santina <jeremy.santina at gmail.com>
>> Date: Tuesday, July 1, 2014 2:31 AM
>> To: Kenneth Moreland <kmorel at sandia.gov>
>> Cc: "paraview at paraview.org" <paraview at paraview.org>
>> Subject: [EXTERNAL] Re: [Paraview] Rendering in parallel
>>
>>   Actually, I did try the D3 filter but I didn't really see any better
>> results. Maybe it is because I don't know how to configure it. How does D3
>> filter work ?
>>
>>
>>
>> 2014-06-30 16:21 GMT+02:00 Moreland, Kenneth <kmorel at sandia.gov>:
>>
>>>   Jeremy,
>>>
>>>  Like the other parallel processing in ParaView, the efficiency is
>>> dictated by the distribution of the data. If your data distribution is
>>> highly imbalanced such as when all the data is on one process as in your
>>> case, then all the processing will happen where the data is and the rest of
>>> the processors will remain idle.
>>>
>>>  You could try running the D3 filter. That should redistribute the
>>> point data more evenly.
>>>
>>>  -Ken
>>>
>>>   From: Jérémy Santina <jeremy.santina at gmail.com>
>>> Date: Monday, June 30, 2014 2:55 AM
>>> To: "paraview at paraview.org" <paraview at paraview.org>
>>> Subject: [EXTERNAL] [Paraview] Rendering in parallel
>>>
>>>    Good morning,
>>>
>>>  I am a novice user of Paraview and there are some aspects which I am
>>> not familiar with. Here is one of the issues I am having :
>>>
>>> I run Paraview in Client-Server mode, performing the data processing and
>>> the rendering on the remote server, and I read a Tecplot Binary File (.plt)
>>> composed of more than 30 millions of points. This take a lot of time. An
>>> idea to speed up the calculation is to launch the server in parallel. I
>>> know that many readers can not read in parallel (it is the case of
>>> TecplotBinaryFileReader I think) so I don't expect any improvment in this
>>> way.
>>>
>>> But, examining the Timer Log, I noticed that it doesn't speed up the
>>> rendering either. I tested many times displaying the points and both
>>> experiment with parallelism and without gave the same results (about 40-50
>>> sec). I don't understand why.
>>>
>>>  Do I misinterpret the Timer Log ? Is the time of rendering long enough
>>> to conclude ? Do I have to set specific parameters to make it works ?
>>>
>>>  I thank you in advance for your help.
>>>
>>>  Jérémy
>>>
>>
>>
>
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