[Paraview] Which reader run in parallel? All of them?

[Cook, Rich]

Hi, Ken,
your approach makes sense, unless you are in my shoes of maintaining the software for use by others.  In that case, users come to me asking which package they should use to view their data and the ability to view in parallel is an important consideration which I’d like to have at my fingertips.

So far it’s not so frequent, but quantifying it in some way would help me at least as a central maintenance and support guy.  But it seems I will have to take your approach, querying piecemeal as needed.

Thanks
— Rich

On Nov 25, 2014, at 11:16 AM, Moreland, Kenneth <kmorel at sandia.gov<mailto:kmorel at sandia.gov>> wrote:

Like VisIt, there exist readers in ParaView that do not perform well or at all when reading data in parallel. There are practical reasons for allowing non-parallel readers to exist within ParaView (and VisIt). The underling architecture is modular and designed to make it straightforward to add components like readers. Thus, the reader implementation often happens outside of ParaView development and is not necessarily designed for parallel usage. It is also the case that many file formats are not very amenable for parallel reading, but there are still good use cases for supporting them in some way in ParaView.

As far as I know, there is no list of what readers do or do not read in parallel. I suppose it would be possible to iterate over all readers and see which ones report pieces or extents, but that would not give reliable information about parallel behavior or the limitations. It would be hard to quantify the parallel behavior of the readers in any meaningful way.

A list of parallel readers may not be the right way to ask the question. A better question to ask is if I have data in a particular format can I read that in parallel? Yes, this is most reliably answered by pouring through the source code, but an email to this list will probably provide a satisfactory answer if its a common format. The converse question is for data of a given type, what is the best file format to use for parallel performance? You're bound to get a more complete answer by asking humans than consulting a list.

-Evil ParaView Overlord #42

From: <Cook>, Rich <cook47 at llnl.gov<mailto:cook47 at llnl.gov>>
Date: Tuesday, November 25, 2014 at 11:16 AM
To: "paraview at paraview.org<mailto:paraview at paraview.org>" <paraview at paraview.org<mailto:paraview at paraview.org>>
Subject: [EXTERNAL] [Paraview] Which reader run in parallel? All of them?

Hello Paraview Overlords,
Does every paraview reader run in parallel with its data?  I know that is not the case with VisIt, so I’m thinking probably not true for paraview either.
If not, is there a list of which readers parallelize and which are not, or a way to compile such a list without reading the source code?
Thanks!

--
✐Richard Cook
✇ Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Bldg-453 Rm-4024, Mail Stop L-557
7000 East Avenue,  Livermore, CA, 94550, USA
☎ (office) (925) 423-9605
☎ (fax) (925) 423-6961
---
Information Management & Graphics Grp., Services & Development Div., Integrated Computing & Communications Dept.
(opinions expressed herein are mine and not those of LLNL)




--
✐Richard Cook
✇ Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Bldg-453 Rm-4024, Mail Stop L-557
7000 East Avenue,  Livermore, CA, 94550, USA
☎ (office) (925) 423-9605
☎ (fax) (925) 423-6961
---
Information Management & Graphics Grp., Services & Development Div., Integrated Computing & Communications Dept.
(opinions expressed herein are mine and not those of LLNL)



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