[Paraview] catalyst with parallel rendering

[Mark Olesen]

For the mailing list, since this must probably be a FAQ (even if I seem 
to find the answer in the usual places).

I would like to have paraview rendering in parallel for a simulation 
with catalyst. For simplicity, I'm fiddling about on a local 
workstation, but would like to generalize later. it should work without 
live visualization enabled, or requiring a GUI to connect.

I'd presume using something like the following

mpirun -np 12 pvserver --server-port=123456 --force-offscreen-rendering

would be setup a parallel rendering session as usual. However, after 
scouring docs there doesn't seem to be an obvious way to connect this 
within catalyst (without a GUI).

The only access point that I seem to find is to define an MPI 
communicator for initializing catalyst after some how (some hand-waving 
here) querying a pvserver connection for its host topology and defining 
an appropriate communicator.

Cheers,

/mark