[vtkusers] Building distributed vtk applications with MPI / CORBA

[Mark Asbach]

Hi list,

I'm currently investigating the topic mentioned in the subject and I'd 
like to collect some tips from this mailing list to avoid possibly 
going in the wrong direction or re-inventing the wheel …

A search in the mailing list archive showed that few people asked for 
CORBA which makes me wonder. Also there's a paper on parallelizing vtk 
with the aid of MPI (the classes in vtk's “Parallel” folder seem to be 
modeled after this paper) which analyzes the situation correctly but 
(that's my impression) goes into the wrong direction in implementing 
everything that RPC tools like CORBA provide for free under the hood of 
MPI.

Did anyone here implement a distributed vtk application with either 
plain SunRPC, COM, Java RMI or CORBA? I'm especially interested in 
distributed visualization pipelines (pipeline parallelism over network 
boundaries, asynchronous calls, Mtime handling). I guess, I'll start 
with reworking the vtkOuputPort / vtkInputPort into CORBA, but the 
inner workings of the pipeline update mechanism are still a mystery to 
me.

Some links to material on the web would also be very helpful to me.

BTW: This is what I found so far (and it's not much):

vtk and MPI:

http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/fl/publications/ahrens00.pdf

vtk and CORBA:

(from my understanding, they don't use distributed visualization 
pipeline but use CORBA to invoke python on remote hosts - is that 
correct?)
http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/TechFocus/Projects/NCSA/VisBench.html

http://public.kitware.com/pipermail/vtkusers/1999-August/001902.html
http://public.kitware.com/pipermail/vtkusers/2000-February/000097.html
http://public.kitware.com/pipermail/vtkusers/2000-October/004643.html
http://public.kitware.com/pipermail/vtkusers/2001-August/007532.html
http://public.kitware.com/pipermail/vtkusers/2002-June/011734.html

Thanks in advance,

Mark (student)