[vtkusers] VTK and CUDA and Parallel Dataflow Streaming (PDS)

[David E DeMarle]

On Thu, Jan 31, 2013 at 1:15 PM, Qiang Wang <wangq1979 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> I am using VTK 5.10 to do some contour rendering and 2D image processing
> with capacity of handling images about 10000 images per minute, but the
> performance is below our expectation. Therefore, I need some improvement in
> terms of performance, and here are my questions:
>
> 1. I was wondering how much VTK leverages the GPU capabilities and supports
> CUDA? Does VTK support GPU capabilities and CUDA in general terms instead of
> only for some specific data types or algorithms such as FFT?

VTK has very little GPU support outside of rendering. This is likely
to change in upcoming versions. See for example, VTK's interface to
LANL's piston GPGPU library in the current master branch (and ParaView
3.98.0). Even there the support is for specific data structures and
algorithms since porting or adapting all of VTK onto GPUs is a very
big task.

>
> 2. Since the 2D images we concerned are actually raw data which are not
> supported by VTK, they have to be loaded and processed by our own class. In
> this case, can I still utilise the VTK-provided GPC/CUDA facilities?
>

To do anything with VTK, you first have to push your data into a
vtkDataObject. For raw 2D data importing is simple, make a 2D
vtkImageData and assign the pointer to your buffer to that container.
Then all of the imaging filters will be able to work with it.

>
> 3. I recently read the paper of  "streaming-enabled parallel data flow
> framework in the visualization toolkit", and the author said the current
> release of VTK includes a complete implementation of PDS. But when I
> explored the document, I did not find the class or function provided by PDS.
> Do I need install any extension to support PDS?
>

Huy's work for that paper lives in the vtkThreadedStreamingPipeline
class. Those features are a little used part of VTK, but I know of one
project at least that did use them successfully, so there is hope that
it is in a usable state.

>
> Thanks,
>
> Qiang
>
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