viz-paraview making use of more CPU cores per GPU

Peter Tyson — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 01:34:30 -0000

The Paraview people recommend making use of multiple available CPU cores per GPU ( see http://www.vtk.org/Wiki/Setting_up_a_ParaView_Server\) as rendering rendering speed isn't usually the bottleneck in visualisation using modern hardware ad it would be nice if the viz-paraview script could run in this way. Perhaps it would be easiest to implement this when using GPUs exclusively, and then the user could specify how many pvserver instances to start per GPU although I suppose it could be implemented with shared GPUs as well. As an illustration of the issue currently, to make use of all the CPU cores with viz-paraview on our system we would need to share each GPU six ways (12 core systems with two GPUs) which is less than ideal for other uses and in any case starting six X servers per GPU seems a bit excessive. It would seem to be more efficient to have a single X server per GPU and six pvserver instances all using the same X server for rendering. I think this would be a nice addition to the already very useful script.

Need a mechanism to allocate specific resources

Shree — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 13:16:50 -0000

VizStack scripts typically allocate resources as asked for by the user. Mechanisms are provided to ask for specific properties of the resources, e.g. a GPU capable of stereo, or a GPU on a specfiic node. However, there is no mechanism to allocate specific, known resources from scripts.

The allocate function is very flexible and can allocate resources to meet many common criteria. Not all the flexibility is needed at the command line level.

Two types of allocations seem to be of interest: allocating specific GPUs and allocating specific nodes. A mechanism is needed to make this possible.

An interesting item to think about is : how will the additional resources be used ?these.

Recent changes to feature-requests

viz-paraview making use of more CPU cores per GPU

Need a mechanism to allocate specific resources