[Paraview] [EXTERNAL] Memory explosion and strange behavior -- Linux -- 'clip' -- 360 MB file needs 60 GB ??

[Dr. Roman Grothausmann]

Concerning the clipping of volume data when doing volume rendering is done more 
precise in paraview than often necessary: even individual voxels are clipped. 
With such large data this is likely not visible at all. I therefore tried to use 
the vtkImplicitFunctionToImageStencil to create a paraview plugin. Sadly so far 
that can only be done outside paraview. See this thread:
http://www.paraview.org/pipermail/paraview/2013-August/028988.html
and on mantis:
http://www.paraview.org/Bug/view.php?id=14236

Best wishes
Roman


On 02/06/14 19:11, Scott, W Alan wrote:
> Not replying to your specific questions below, but ... you have some pretty large data here!  It is amazing how a fairly small cell count on the edge of your data (for instance X axis) can become huge when you add a Y axis and Z axis.
>
> You have about 375 million cells.  If you were able to volume render that on a local server, one machine, I believe you have the world's record!  Wow.
>
> Generally speaking, I sort of tell people that anything around thousands of cells is a toy, a million is real data (and you should start thinking about using a cluster for a back end), and a billion is hero size and you want some heavy iron to deal with it.  Tens of billions, and especially trillions, pushes state of the art.  If you are volume rendering, divide any of these numbers by 10.
>
> By the way, exascale will be in the trillions of cells.  Some of the greatest minds in the world are still trying to figure out how to visualize data of this size.
>
> Alan
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: ParaView [mailto:paraview-bounces at paraview.org] On Behalf Of Robert.Atwood at diamond.ac.uk
> Sent: Monday, June 02, 2014 9:42 AM
> To: paraview at paraview.org
> Subject: [EXTERNAL] [Paraview] Memory explosion and strange behaviour -- Linux -- 'clip' -- 360 MB file needs 60 GB ??
>
> Hi,
> I like volume viewing in Paraview 4.1.0 so far!
>
> But, when I try to use even what I consider a rather small subset of one image file that I work with normally, the large memory on my large memory workstation still gets used up.
>
> I am using Red Hat 6 on a system with 100 GB of Ram, adn a Quadro 6000 graphics card. I have compiled the Paraview code that I downloaded on Friday.
>
> The image I loaded is saved as raw unsinged 8-bit and is 860x872x501 voxels i.e. about 360 MB file. If I load it and then try to apply the 'clip' tool, the system is unresponsive for a few minutes. If I run 'top ' during this process I see the memory in use expand up to 60 GB , this seems excessive!
>
> Then, the resulting display behaves oddly, the clipped view suddenly 'vanishes' after moving the view around ??
>
>
>

-- 
Dr. Roman Grothausmann

Tomographie und Digitale Bildverarbeitung
Tomography and Digital Image Analysis

Institut für Funktionelle und Angewandte Anatomie, OE 4120
Medizinische Hochschule Hannover
Carl-Neuberg-Str. 1
D-30625 Hannover

Tel. +49 511 532-9574