[Hisham]

Dear Foamers,

Does paraFoam runs as a parallel process by default or do I have to make an mpirun command.

I ask that because as I've read about setting up a ParaView server, the client command was:

mpirun -n 4 ./pvserver ...

I tried on my PC (locally without any connections or anything) to run:

mpirun -n 4 paraFoam &

What happened was that 4 paraFoam instances were opened. So, I guess I did not make a right assumption.

Feedback is welcome

Best regards,
Hisham

[wyldckat]

Greetings Hisham,

Well, AFAIK, currently we cannot execute paraFoam itself in parallel. And I haven't been able to confirm this myself, but what we do need to do is:

1. All of the machines that will handle the simulation case, must have a working OpenFOAM installation, using the same exact versions of both ParaView and OpenFOAM.
2. Launch pvserver with mpirun, so we have one pvserver per sub-domain/processor.
3. Create a file for opening the case afterwards, namely running:

   paraFoam -touch

4. Finally, run paraview and connect to the master pvserver.

I've written about this elsewhere as well: connection to external server - it's a bit more detailed and oriented for remote access, but the basics are there as well

A very important detail is that ParaView must be built with MPI capabilities for things to work properly, at least in the server machine. Usually this can be achieved with running in the ThirdParty folder:

./makeParaView -mpi

Use "-help" for more information on other options as well.
For more information on building ParaView, you can read here: Building ParaView 3.10.1 with custom Qt 4.6.4

Best regards,
Bruno

[Hisham]

Hi Bruno,

Thanks a lot! These links will surely make a nice weekend reading assignment

can't wait to do so

Regards
Hisham