[vtkusers] VTK Performance and SMP

[Lisa Avila]

Hello Cameron,

There are two flavors of parallel processing supported (to different 
levels) in VTK.

For shared memory parallelism, many algorithms will automatically use 
additional processors when available. For example, most of the imaging 
filters and some of the graphics filters will use additional processors, as 
will the volume ray cast mapper.

VTK also has some base support of distributed processing. This is not done 
transparently - you have to set up pipelines across different processors. 
ParaView is an application built on top of VTK that does the division of 
the data / processing across a cluster for you. Check out the web site at 
www.paraview.org.

Lisa


At 07:29 PM 6/15/2004, Cameron N. Perry wrote:
>My programming skills are nowhere good enough to understand what it is
>I'm looking at on the manual pages; we have to hire somebody to do our
>VTK programming. I can see that there is at least *some* parallel
>functionality, but what does this all mean (i.e. vtkParallelFactory,
>etc)? How much does this contribute to visualization applications as a
>whole?
>
>The reply below still does not answer the other questions (see below).
>Does anybody have an idea?
>
>Thanks!
>Cameron
>
>On Tue, 2004-06-15 at 01:00, REGAT-BARREL Aurélien wrote:
> > Hi,
> > You should have a look at vtkParallel to get more infos.
> > Greets.
> >
> > "Cameron N. Perry" <cnperry at ucsd.edu> wrote:
> >         Hi,
> >
> >         I'm not too familiar with VTK quite yet, but I have a few
> >         questions
> >         which some of you may be able to answer regarding VTK and
> >         system
> >         performance. My lab is planning on purchasing a cluster and
> >         your answers
> >         will greatly help us decide what configurations are best.
> >
> >         1) Is SMP native to VTK (i.e. no additional SMP programming
> >         req'd)?
> >         2) When using SMP, how large/small is the performance increase
> >         with a
> >         second processor?
> >         3) Are there any stability issues with SMP (sorry. I have to
> >         ask)?
> >         4) What processor seems to have the best performance with VTK
> >         (i.e. P4,
> >         Opteron, Xeon, etc.)?
> >         5) How efficient is VTK's memory management?
> >
> >
> >         Thanks much! I really appreciate your help.
> >         Cameron Perry
>
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