[Paraview] opinion on new machine for visualization

[Moreland, Kenneth]

We use OpenMPI on our cluster, and a command that seems to work is the following:

  mpirun -bynode -np 4 /path/to/paraview -display localhost:0 :
     -np 4 /path/to/paraview -display localhost:1

The -bynode flag tells mpirun to assign processes in a round robin fashion.  The next part says that the first 4 processes should be launched as paraview with the display set to the first graphics card.  The colon (:) sets of the next partition of processors, another 4 instances of paraview with their display set to the second graphics card.

I don't know if other implementations of MPI such as mpich support the -bynode flag and the use of the : to specify different command lines for different blocks of processes, but I am sure that there is some convention for launching heterogeneous jobs.

-Ken

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ricardo Reis [mailto:rreis at aero.ist.utl.pt]
> Sent: Saturday, April 05, 2008 5:54 AM
> To: Moreland, Kenneth
> Cc: paraview at paraview.org
> Subject: RE: [Paraview] opinion on new machine for visualization
>
> On Tue, 1 Apr 2008, Moreland, Kenneth wrote:
>
> > I'm not much of an expert on hardware performance, but I think you'll
> > get more mileage out of having two graphics boards per node.  That's how
> > one of our clusters is set up (2 GPU's, 4 CPU cores per node), and it
> > works OK.  Our graphics cards are set up so that each uses a different
> > xhost.  It's a little tricky setting up your MPI job to launch ParaView
> > to use different displays on different nodes, but once you get that set
> > up it works fine.
>
> Can you send me some pointers or config files? I've decided to buy a quad
> with two 8800 graphic cards.
>
> greets,
>
>   Ricardo Reis
>
>   'Non Serviam'
>
>   PhD student @ Lasef
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>
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>
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