[Paraview] Some questions about Catalyst Live Visualization

[Adam Lyon]

Hi, I have recently been successful in hooking up Catalyst to our Particle
Physics analysis framework that we use at Fermilab. Our main use case is to
make an "event display" - that is a visualization of a high energy physics
event (e.g. particle collision) in a simulated detector. The Catalyst Live
feature allows us to connect ParaView to a running analysis or simulation
job and visualize the events as they're being processed. It's very cool.
This is typically a program difficult to write - but Catalyst and ParaView
make this much easier.

This is a bit different from CFD simulations -- for us each "time step" in
an independent event. But the system works really well and many here are
excited about it.

I have three questions (so far) about the Catalyst Live system...

1) The VTK objects appear in the connected ParaView client as
"PVTrivialProducer0", "PVTrivialProducer1", etc. The catalyst pipeline
knows the real names of these objects. For example I have in my catalyst
pipeline python script,

...
simSteps = coprocessor.CreateProducer(datadescription, 'simSteps')
simCalHits = coprocessor.CreateProducer(datadescription, 'simCalHits')
...
[that's the only stuff in the pipeline]

Is there some way to have "simSteps" and "simCalHits" show up in my
ParaView client instead of "PVTrivialProducer0", etc?

2) Our analysis framework converts our data objects into VTK objects for
feeding to Catalyst (usually vtkPolyData). This is a potentially expensive
operation. If no ParaView client is connected to the Catalyst port, then
there's no reason for this translation to occur (we just using the Live
visualization feature at the moment). Is there a way for the adapter (e.g.
the vtkCPProcessor object) to discover if a ParaView client is connected?
That would save time if no one is connected.

3) In addition to setting breakpoints on time steps (events for us), it
would be nice to have a "single step" feature that would simply allow the
program to advance to the next one. Is that possible to do from python
within ParaView?

Thanks!!! -- Adam

*------*

*Adam L. Lyon*
*Scientist; Associate Division Head for Systems for Scientific Applications*

Scientific Computing Division & Muon g-2 Experiment
Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory
630 840 5522 office
www.fnal.gov
lyon at fnal.gov

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