PVPiston – GPU accelerated filters for ParaView

This plugin integrates LANL’s Piston (http://viz.lanl.gov/projects/PISTON.html), GPGPU accelerated filters into ParaView.

To use it you must compile ParaView with the PARAVIEW_USE_PISTON cmake configuration option. Once compiled and loaded new filters appear in the Piston submenu of the Filters menu. Note that currently the plugin is only compatible with standalone, serial ParaView runs.

To use Piston, first apply the SendToPiston filter. This filter moves data from the CPU onto the GPU where the rest of the filters do their work. Currently, this filter is only applicable to uniform grid data that has a single floating point scalar array. Polygonal data is also accepted, but there are no Piston filters yet that operate on this type of data.

Next apply the Piston sort, threshold, slice or contour filters to process the data on the GPU. Finally, apply the GetFromPiston filter to bring the data back to the CPU, where it can be further processed with standard VTK filters.

Data produced by the piston filters is rendered via the vtkPistonMapper. If you start ParaView with the:

“--use-cuda-interop” argument, the mapper will do its work directly in GPU space without first transferring the data back to the CPU for rendering.