[Paraview] Does running Catalyst require osmesa?

[Christopher Neal]

Thanks for the insight guys,


So if someone is running a Catalyst instrumented code that is compiled on a supercomputer with thousands of back-end nodes, can they link to a ParaView build or a Catalyst Edition and expect the code to work? Do back-end nodes have X servers available to them?

Thank you,

Chris Neal

From: Chuck Atkins <chuck.atkins at kitware.com>
Date: Friday, August 19, 2016 at 2:47 PM
To: Christopher Neal <chrisneal at snumerics.com>
Cc: ParaView <paraview at paraview.org>
Subject: Re: [Paraview] Does running Catalyst require osmesa?

 

Hi Chris,

Catalyst uses the exact same rendering infrastructure as the rest of ParaView so you if you can render with pvpython and pvserver then you can render with Catalyst in the same configuration.  If you don't use OSMesa and instead use "regular" GL then you'll just need to have an X server available and it's associated plumbing set up for Catalyst to be able to render.  The nice part about OSMesa builds are that you don't need to deal with X at all, but then you don't have access to the GPU so your render performance is significantly reduced.  That may be fine though if your pipeline is heavily compute-bound instead of render-bound, as is often the case.  If you want to bypass the X server but still use your GPU, another option is to enable EGL (warning, still bit experimental).  Currently, it only works on NVidia GPUs with a very current driver but you get the libGL benefit of GPU accelerated rendering with the libOSMesa benefit of not dealing with an X server.

Either way, all three configurations for ParaView will work with Catalyst: libGL (gpu w/ X, default), libOSMesa (cpu w/o X), and EGL (gpu w/o X).


----------
Chuck Atkins
Staff R&D Engineer, Scientific Computing
Kitware, Inc.

 

On Fri, Aug 19, 2016 at 2:16 PM, Christopher Neal <chrisneal at snumerics.com> wrote:

Hi,

 

I’m playing around with different builds of ParaView(all with catalyst enabled). I’m not using a Catalyst edition because of some build issues that I was having with cmake. One thing that I wanted to understand is:  If I compile a version of ParaView with Catalyst enabled, but GUI disabled, will I still be able to run a Catalyst example that outputs images?

Or would I need to figure out how to compile ParaView with OSMESA?

Thank you,

Chris Neal


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