[vtkusers] Parallel rendering question

[Berk Geveci]

> I am implementing a solution to visualise a simulation data in Grid
> environment with access thru a thin client.
>
> Because of that I need a solution which is rather non-interactive as
> I have to render off-screen. I have thought about paraview, but
> running it from a batch mode wasn't clear to me.
>
> So far my idea was to download all data into one node an render it,
> but since vtk has parallel rendering capabilities I want to use
> mpich-g2 and try to run it on Grid, which seems to be far better idea.

Very cool. I think you should go with paraview+python. I am not trying
to pitch paraview here; rather trying to help you save a lot of time.
There are a lot of undocumented features in VTK you would have to use
to get it to process and render (even worse volume render) in
parallel. It can be done (look at
VTK/Parallel/Testing/Cxx/TestPStream.cxx for an example) but there are
a lot of pitfalls. I am starting to write documentation for paraview's
python interface so there should be decent help for it soon.

-berk