ParaView 3 Telecon 09-24-2009

Item	People	Description
1	Ice	MARS/V&V Milestone issues
2	Moreland	Stronger Dashboard Boiling the frog coverage
3	Thompson	Statistics Update
4	Ayachit	Partial Arrays with Plot Over Line (Bug #9252)
5	Ayachit	Fast online help updates (relates to Bug #8923)
6	Moreland	Time pipeline changes owner
7	Moreland	Python shell overloaded?
8	Moreland	PV scalar bar to VTK?

MARS Milestone

Previously:

Nathan talked to Karen Devine for suggestions. She suggested using a "data dictionary" to resolve fragments. You do two all-to-all broadcasts to choose which id to assign to each fragment.

Berk reports that the biggest bottleneck to scaling is the exchange of ghost cell information. One approach would be to not do ghost cells and do fragment resolution later. The down side is that interfaces become non-watertight. We should at least try approaches that do no communication (such as CTH parts) to at least demonstrate the scalability.

Another possibility is to try to leverage the ghost levels provided by CTH.

This Week:

Stronger Dashboard

Previously:

Dave P. is now monitoring the dashboard.

Utkarsh is still going to think about how to run more tests faster.

In Utkarsh's branding branch, allows you to run multiple tests in one invocation and have each have their own result images. Between tests, the GUI resets but the connection remains. You can also isolate tests that could effect others (like the color palette tests).

Might be committing the branding stuff next week.

This Week:

Statistics Update

Previously:

• Initial implementation complete.
• Should there be a "no second input" version of each filter? no, use Hints
• Approaches for handling shared points in distributed-memory mode?
• How to create tests for plugins? turn it into not-a-plugin
• If/when to merge into 3.6 branch? send patch to Utkarsh
• Semi-offtopic: "Root" of multiblock of tables appears to be mashed version of first table?
• Semi-offtopic: Possible to include HTML/images in online docs?

This week:

• Moved out of plugin directory (no tests yet)
• Hints added to avoid Input Selector pop-up
• Patch for 3.6.2 sent to Utkarsh and integrated
• Avoiding skew in distributed-memory mode: there are 2 cases to handle (but not for 3.6.2)
  • Unstructured: if data has point GLOBAL_ID attribute, might not be too hard to compute a list of ranges of IDs present on each process, do an AllGather, and then have each process determine which IDs it owns (using a lowest-rank tie-breaker rule). When the D3 filter assigns global IDs, it gives each process a contiguous range of IDs so the list of ranges should be small (on the size of the number of boundaries with other processes, not the size of the mesh "interior" to each process).
  • Structured: This is simple using a lowest-rank tie-breaker rule.
• Starting to make screencasts to use at VisWeek tutorial and perhaps on ParaView wiki. Here's a k-means screencast example. I would upload it to this wiki but the m4v and mov file extensions are banned.

Modulo any bugs, this is done.

Partial Arrays

We will add a flag to the probe filter to put NaN's where a variable is not available. In VTK this would be off by default, but we would try turning it on in ParaView and see what effect this had.

Fast online help updates

Utkarsh is running around like a chicken without a head trying to maintain all of the places that contain ParaView documentation. Instead, he wants to maintain all of the up-to-date documentation on the Wiki. From there, we can pull pages from the Wiki for the online help of the distributions. This will be done for 3.8.

Time pipeline changes owner

We need to find a new "owner" for the pipeline work. (The current experts are unavailable.) One of the most immediate concerns is to fix some of the issues with the temporal data support. There are several ParaView bugs concerning this.

Python shell overloaded?

Right now the python shell is overload. In addition to having the edit window to enter Python commands, there is now a bunch of widgets attached to the side to handle tracing and macros. These macros should be split into their own dialog box(es).

One of the reasons it is there is probably so that it can use the python interpreter in the dialog box. Instead, there should be a global python interpreter that is used application-wide.