[Paraview] running Paraview vis pvbatch with NO GUI - help?

[Hart, Cynthia Joyce - (cyndyb)]

Hi folks -

I am new to Paraview and even newer to scripting with Python for Paraview (though at least, I am not new to programming!).  I have a need to  run Paraview on our HPC cluster here at the University of Arizona, and I need it to run ‘headless’ - I desire no GUI output at all, but to process & filter an image series and create output, to be read into a local Paraview instance later.

Here’s a few details, and my questions – the way I am going about this, I run Paraview normally, start a trace to create a python script, read in my image series and process it, then save the script.  I then upload the script and data to our HPC.  That all works great!  However, I run into trouble fully understanding how to manipulate the DATA vs. the RENDERING of what I ultimately would like to save to disk, to read into the Paraview GUI later, off line form the HPC cluster.

So, firstly – If I read in a csv series of images, one image/file per moment in time, when I run a filter, the filter should run on the entire series, correct?  But when I do this and then try to save the data – in this case, a series of table to points calculations, it only saves the last one.   Ideally, I’d like to save an animation and save the data, but WITHOUT calling on the GUI / rendering aspects of Paraview.   Is this possible, and if so, how do I go about it?

I did run across this thread on the web:

http://www.cfd-online.com/Forums/openfoam/98732-paraview-shell-mode-python-script-running.html

Which mentions building Paraview with  OSMesa (CPU based offscreen rendering) enabled… sounds like what I want, but how do I go about determining if the version of Paraview on my system ~s~ built is this manner, and if indeed it is, how do I script in Python to take advantage of that?

Many thanks,

Cynthia


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