[Paraview] Fwd: Rendering speed sluggish using cluster

[Christian Butcher]

Dear ParaView Users,

I'm rendering a pseudo-2D data set of approx 7 million cells, running
'mpirun ... pvserver'.

I can connect remotely. The cluster does not have graphics cards
installed, so I'm using the '--use-offscreen-rendering' flag.

The client options for 'Remote Render Threshold' and 'LODThreshold'
are both set to 0.

On the cluster, I'm currently trying with 48 cores each using 16GB
RAM, just in case I was previously using too little. I'm pretty sure
this is overkill - certainly the problem seems comparable to when I
run it on 8 cores each using 4GB RAM etc.

I suspect I'm just not using the software well, or have installed
either the client or (more likely?) the cluster's pvserver badly.

Both are using 4.2.0, client has version "4.2.0-287-g1631961 64-bit",
pvserver returns just "4.2.0" as the version.

When changing any aspect of the render view, the client becomes
unresponsive/sluggish for long periods of time. This includes, for
example, moving the coloring scale bar across the screen.

I'm sure I'm missing something obvious (like a step to cut down the
requirements on the client workstation, for example).

What should I be doing differently?

The script I used to start ccmake is below - other options were left
at default values (iirc):

ccmake \
        -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE:STRING=RelWithDebInfo \
        -DCMAKE_CXX_COMPILER:FILEPATH=/apps/gnu/openmpi.gcc/1.8.3/bin/mpic++ \
        -DCMAKE_C_COMPILER:FILEPATH=/apps/gnu/openmpi.gcc/1.8.3/bin/mpicc \
        -DCMAKE_Fortran_COMPILER:FILEPATH=/apps/gnu/openmpi.gcc/1.8.3/bin/mpifort
\
        -DPARAVIEW_USE_MPI:BOOL=ON \
\
        -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX:PATH=/home/c/christian-butcher/Applications \
        -DBoost_INCLUDE_DIR:PATH=/home/c/christian-butcher/Applications/include
\
        -DBoost_LIBRARY_DIRS:FILEPATH=/home/c/christian-butcher/Applications/lib
\
\
        -DPARAVIEW_BUILD_QT_GUI:BOOL=OFF \
        -DBUILD_TESTING:BOOL=OFF \
        -DBUILD_EXAMPLES:BOOL=FALSE \
        -DBUILD_SHARED_LIBS:BOOL=ON \
        -DBUILD_DOCUMENTATION:BOOL=OFF \
        -DPARAVIEW_INSTALL_DEVELOPMENT_FILES:BOOL=ON \
\
        -DPARAVIEW_ENABLE_FFMPEG:BOOL=ON \
        -DPARAVIEW_USE_VISITBRIDGE:BOOL=ON \
\
        -DVTK_OPENGL_HAS_OSMESA:BOOL=ON \
        -DVTK_USE_OFFSCREEN:BOOL=ON \
        -DVISIT_BUILD_READER_GMV:BOOL=OFF \
\
        -DPARAVIEW_BUILD_PLUGIN_AnalyzeNIfTIIO:BOOL=OFF \
        -DPARAVIEW_BUILD_PLUGIN_H5PartReader:BOOL=ON \
        -DPARAVIEW_BUILD_PLUGIN_GMVReader:BOOL=FALSE \
        -DPARAVIEW_BUILD_PLUGIN_Moments:BOOL=FALSE \
        -DPARAVIEW_BUILD_PLUGIN_PacMan:BOOL=FALSE \
        -DPARAVIEW_BUILD_PLUGIN_SLACTools:BOOL=FALSE \
        -DPARAVIEW_BUILD_PLUGIN_SciberQuestToolKit:BOOL=FALSE \
        -DPARAVIEW_BUILD_PLUGIN_SierraPlotTools:BOOL=FALSE \
\
        -DVTK_USE_SYSTEM_ZLIB:BOOL=ON \
        -DVTK_USE_SYSTEM_EXPAT:BOOL=ON \
        -DVTK_USE_X:BOOL=OFF \
\
-DModule_vtkFiltersParallelGeometry=ON \
-DModule_vtkFiltersSMP=ON \
-DModule_vtkFiltersSelection=ON \
-DModule_vtkIOMPIParallel=ON \
-DModule_vtkImagingMath=ON \
-DModule_vtkImagingStatistics=ON \
-DModule_vtkImagingStencil=ON \
\
        -DOPENGL_INCLUDE_DIR:PATH=/home/c/christian-butcher/Applications/include
\
        -DOPENGL_gl_LIBRARY:FILEPATH=/home/c/christian-butcher/Applications/lib/libOSMesa.so
\
        -DOPENGL_glu_LIBRARY:FILEPATH=/home/c/christian-butcher/Applications/lib/libGLU.so
\
        -DOSMESA_LIBRARY:FILEPATH=/home/c/christian-butcher/Applications/lib/libOSMesa.so
\
        -DOSMESA_INCLUDE_DIR:PATH=/home/c/christian-butcher/Applications/include
\
        $APPS/source/git-sources/ParaView