[Paraview] Sanity Check - Parallel GPU rendering

[Shree Kumar]

Hi Paul,

On Tue, Apr 27, 2010 at 5:06 PM, Paul McIntosh <
paul.mcintosh at internetscooter.com> wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> I am trying to get parallel GPU accelerated volume rendering happening and
> I
> just want to confirm my understanding below is correct...
>
> For GPU acceleration I will require X Server running on each node so that
> ParaView can create a local OpenGL context to enable OpenGL calls to the
> hardware. The OpenGL context needs to use something like NVIDIA libraries
> as
> it ignores anything that might have OpenGL implemented in software (e.g.
> Mesa).
>
> Googling shows me that it is possible to create screenless X Server
> configurations that use video hardware (e.g. with a NVIDIA Tesla). So in a
> cluster I am assuming that this is what I need to do for each node that I
> wish to participate in the parallel rendering.
>
> Is the above correct? Or is there a simplier way of doing it?
>
>
This approach seems correct.

You would need to configure one X screen per GPU you have.

nvidia-xconfig -a --use-display-device=none

After that, start the X server. Next, write a machine file which will run
one
instance of a paraview render on each GPU. You would need to set the
DISPLAY environment variable  to point to the X server and X screen
corresponding to each GPU.

Use this machine file with mpirun and use the ParaView client to connect
to the machine on rank 0.

I'm not much of a ParaView user, but I have setup parallel rendering using
this method.

HTH
-- Shree
http://www.shreekumar.in/

Cheers,
>
> Paul
> ---
> www.internetscooter.com
>
> _______________________________________________
> 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
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.paraview.org/pipermail/paraview/attachments/20100428/d4ccf6df/attachment.htm>