[Paraview] Building on Cray systems

[Tim Gallagher]

Hi everybody,

I'm about to endeavor on the always fun process of building Paraview on Cray systems, specifically Copper (ERDC), Garnet (ERDC) and Excalibur (ARL). Little is ever easy on these systems and I've never succeeded at building paraview on them in the past. However, we want to run with co-processing on the compute nodes and so it's time to try again. 

I saw there are some build scripts in the ParaviewSuperbuild for Cray systems. Does anybody know of any documentation or examples on how to use them? What dependencies do I need to build using the superbuild and what can I use that is already on the system? For example -- python, HDF5, zlib, etc are all available, but do I need to build my own versions? 

Is it possible to build just Paraview (not using the superbuild) using the system-installed modules? Does the FREEZE_PYTHON option work or help eliminate the issues of running on the compute nodes? 

If anybody has any advice on the best way to go, I would greatly appreciate it. We need to have python, co-processing, and off-screen rendering enabled; otherwise, it's just the standard build options.

Thanks!

Tim