Tuesday afternoon I attended the second half of the Advanced ParaView Tutorial lead by researchers from Kitware, Sandia National Labs, and Los Alamos National Labs. They talked about some of the in-research projects they’re working on and gave demonstrations of things you can see in the latest CVS (if you enable them specifically). While not ready for prime-time, they showed alot of new functionality that I think ParaView users world-wide will find useful.
Read up after the break.
Before we start, you can check out all of the Slides shown in the tutorial on the ParaView Wiki.
Manta Integration
The first part of the talk I saw was demonstrating the integration of a CPU Ray-Tracing library named Manta into CVS Paraview. Manta is maintained by the Scientific Computing & Imaging Institute (SCI) at the University of Utah, and solves many of the problems that exist in the current rendering library in ParaView: OpenGL or Mesa. Shown quite powerfully through a simple graph during the presentation, GPU rendering (via OpenGL) ran at approximately 300fps on a single node, but dropped to 30fps when run on 2 nodes.
The bottleneck is in the compositing routines required with the rasterization methods used by OpenGL and Mesa. Ray-tracing, or more accurate ray-casting, is much easier to parallelize and scales almost linearly with the number of processors.
It’s integrated into ParaView through a special new renderwindow, so it’s a bit difficult to setup. Once the Manta Plugin is loaded you have to close the existing render display and create a new “Manta RenderWindow”. Beyond that it runs just like a regular render window. Adjusting colors, setting transparency, and more are all controlled normally. It makes use of SMP capabilities on the node, making it perfect for large machines and HPC’s where you can render dozens or hundreds or rays in parallel.
Given that it is ray-casting, there are many new capabilities as well. It doesn’t currently make these options available, options like Light parameters, shadow settings, antialiasing, etc, but they hoep to add a special RayCasting options panel.
@Jon Woodring Ahh, thanks for the correction. I updated the article.
Thanks for the article on the tutorial!
I just wanted to correct something slightly, the data set was 3600x2400x42 floats, but otherwise correct on the data sizes. Thanks!