Are you assuming we are always running in parallel on the cluster? I find that Paraview for some reason complains when run in serial if you compile it with MPI. So currently I'm doing four builds, opengl, osmesa, opengl-mpi, osmesa-mpi. It's a PITA but now it's all automated. Still I think it's confusing for our users.
I'm also personally unsure about where there is a switch for "--use-offscreen-rendering." If I compile with OSMesa, I'm always going to want that, right? And if OpenGL, I'm always going to disable that, right? Why is there a command line switch for that? It does sound like yes, pvservers will render to graphics cards in parallel so that's good to know. Thanks! -- Rich On Oct 6, 2012, at 7:16 PM, Burlen Loring wrote: > Hi Rich, > > You're always going to want to build with MPI when running on a cluster. > Leveraging your cluster's graphics cards comes down to building with or > without os mesa. you probably want to provide both builds, and select the > build to run depending on whether the user has requested nodes that contain > graphics cards or not. Hardware accelerated rendering can be faster than > software based rendering depending on the amount of contention there is for > the graphics card. eg 16 mpi ranks hitting the same card will likely be > slower than 16 cpu cores running os mesa. When submitting a job you could > always control this by limiting the number of mpi ranks per graphics card. > Also, some rendering algorithms, such as surface LIC, are disabled when using > os mesa. it's nice to have the hardware accelerated build in order to access > the other algorithms when you need them. > > Burlen > > On 10/1/2012 5:05 PM, Cook, Rich wrote: >> We have large clusters and some of them have graphics cards on them. Most >> don't. So normally I expect to be using -DVTK_USE_OFFSCREEN:BOOL=ON >> -DPARAVIEW_USE_MPI:BOOL=ON with cmake. >> I got to thinking. First, if I compile with -DVTK_USE_OFFSCREEN:BOOL=ON >> then why do I have to use --use-offscreen-rendering to launch the pvservers. >> Secondly, can pvservers render to graphics cards for distributed rendering >> under MPI? If so, does it make sense to do -DVTK_USE_OFFSCREEN:BOOL=OFF >> -DPARAVIEW_USE_MPI:BOOL=ON ?? >> > -- ✐Richard Cook ✇ Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory Bldg-453 Rm-4024, Mail Stop L-557 7000 East Avenue, Livermore, CA, 94550, USA ☎ (office) (925) 423-9605 ☎ (fax) (925) 423-6961 --- Information Management & Graphics Grp., Services & Development Div., Integrated Computing & Communications Dept. (opinions expressed herein are mine and not those of LLNL) _______________________________________________ Powered by www.kitware.com Visit other Kitware open-source projects at http://www.kitware.com/opensource/opensource.html Please keep messages on-topic and check the ParaView Wiki at: http://paraview.org/Wiki/ParaView Follow this link to subscribe/unsubscribe: http://www.paraview.org/mailman/listinfo/paraview
