Hi Rich,
You're always going to want to build with MPI when running on a cluster.
Leveraging your cluster's graphics cards comes down to building with or
without os mesa. you probably want to provide both builds, and select
the build to run depending on whether the user has requested nodes that
contain graphics cards or not. Hardware accelerated rendering can be
faster than software based rendering depending on the amount of
contention there is for the graphics card. eg 16 mpi ranks hitting the
same card will likely be slower than 16 cpu cores running os mesa. When
submitting a job you could always control this by limiting the number of
mpi ranks per graphics card. Also, some rendering algorithms, such as
surface LIC, are disabled when using os mesa. it's nice to have the
hardware accelerated build in order to access the other algorithms when
you need them.
Burlen
On 10/1/2012 5:05 PM, Cook, Rich wrote:
We have large clusters and some of them have graphics cards on them. Most
don't. So normally I expect to be using -DVTK_USE_OFFSCREEN:BOOL=ON
-DPARAVIEW_USE_MPI:BOOL=ON with cmake.
I got to thinking. First, if I compile with -DVTK_USE_OFFSCREEN:BOOL=ON then
why do I have to use --use-offscreen-rendering to launch the pvservers.
Secondly, can pvservers render to graphics cards for distributed rendering
under MPI? If so, does it make sense to do -DVTK_USE_OFFSCREEN:BOOL=OFF
-DPARAVIEW_USE_MPI:BOOL=ON ??
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