Kitware just announced VTK4.0 recently, and now they’re back again with announcement of a new feature in the upcoming version of ParaView targeted for massively parallel users dealing with crippling launch times.
Ever wondered why opening the Python shell in ParaView for the very first time, or doing “from paraview.simple import *” in pvpython shell makes your disk spin? It’s because of the loading of shared libraries and *.py files related to both, ParaView modules as well as Python itself (including optional dependencies such as numpy and matplotlib. While this is not a huge deal for most users, when running massively parallel jobs on HPC systems with testy (aka parallel) file systems, it can be a major bottleneck and prohibitively affect the startup times.
Their suggestions are to, of course, compile Statically. But then they announce that in the next version, ParaView 4.0.1, they’ll be adding compile-time support for Python freezing, baking all of the .py scripts right into the resulting binary.
via The Kitware Blog – Beat the heat by freezing Python in ParaView.
