[vtkusers] Building distributed vtk applications with MPI / CORBA

[Song Li]

My project uses VTK, CORBA and MPI. But CORBA and MPI are only used to send parameters from
client to server, once the VTK computaion is done, I used VTK's socketcontroller to send data
back to client. For my understanding, the difficulty to use CORBA with VTK is I don't know how
to serialize VTK's objects, while VTK's own functions make this transparent to users...good
luck!


Mark Asbach wrote:

> 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)
>
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--
Song Li
VRAC(Virtual Reality Application Center),Iowa State University
Email: lisong at vrac.iastate.edu
Homepage: http://www.vrac.iastate.edu/~lisong


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