[vtkusers] Building distributed vtk applications with MPI / CORBA

[Randy Heiland]

Hi Mark,

I can only confirm what you thought to be true regarding the VisBench project -
it was essentially CORBA invoking Python on a remote server.  More recently
we've essentially dropped CORBA as we explore Web Services - and I continue to
use Python throughout.  However, I hope you report back to the list about your
project/experiences when you're done.

--Randy

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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)