pV3 Visualizer

pV3 (parallel Visual3) 1.35 is a freely available visualization package written by Bob Haimes at MIT. pV3 replaces the older Visual3 package, from which it inherits much of the programming and user interface. It consists of a locally written visualization client, pv3, typically processing the finite element data on, e.g., SGI ONYX, and a visualization server, pV3Server, which renders the results on a local graphics workstation. The clients and the server communicate using the PVM protocol.

Documentation

• pV3 Server User's Reference Manual
• pV3 Programmer's Guide
• pV3 Batch User's Reference Manual
• pV3 Advanced Programmer's Guide
• pV3 Labels

  labels for keys F1 through F12, fit most keyboards

Hardcopy of these documents and some related papers can be found in Steinbachstr. 53B room 105.0.

Data Requirements

pV3 client operates directly on the standard MIXD format files.

System Requirements

The PVM 3.3 or higher must be installed on both server and client machines. The server runs on any SGI workstation running IRIX 5.x OS or higher.

Usage

Following lines or equivalent should be added to your .cshrc file:

# set up Visual3 and pV3 environment
setenv Visual3_CP $HOME/proj/colormaps/cols
 
# set up PVM environment
if ( ! $?PVM_ROOT ) then
   set pvmdir=/usr/local/pvm3
   if ($HOST =~ *.mems.rice.edu) set pvmdir=/usr/array/PVM
   if (-d $pvmdir) then
      setenv PVM_ROOT $pvmdir
   endif
endif
if ( $?PVM_ROOT ) then
   setenv PVM_DPATH $PVM_ROOT/lib/pvmd
   setenv PVM_ARCH `$PVM_ROOT/lib/pvmgetarch`
   set path=($path $PVM_ROOT/lib)
   set path=($path $PVM_ROOT/lib/$PVM_ARCH)
   set path=($path $PVM_ROOT/bin/$PVM_ARCH)
endif

Following should be added to the .Xdefaults file:

Visual∗small:     6x10
Visual∗medium:    8x13
Visual∗med2:      -adobe-courier-bold-r-normal--17-120-100-100-m-100-iso8859-1
Visual∗large:     -adobe-courier-bold-r-normal--25-180-100-100-m-150-iso8859-1
4DWm∗Visual3∗clientDecoration:      none
4DWm∗Visual3∗matteWidth:      2

A PVM group should be set up to include the pV3 client machine (typically ivie.mems.rice.edu or tempest.mems.rice.edu) and your workstation (albacore.mems.rice.edu in this example):

albacore(test)% pvm
3.3.10 (SGI PVM for IRIX Version 3.2.0.2)
t40001
pvm> add tempest
1 successful
                     HOST     DTID
    tempest.mems.rice.edu    80000
pvm> conf
2 hosts, 1 data format
                     HOST     DTID     ARCH   SPEED
  albacore.mems.rice.edu    40000 SGIMP64mips3    1000
   tempest.mems.rice.edu    80000 SGIMP64mips3    1000

Start the pV3 client on tempest:

tempest(test)% pv3
 
pV3 Front End 1.35 - October 15, 1999
...
 
 pV3 Initialization Phase Complete!

Then start the pV3 server on the local workstation:

albacore(test)% pv3server
...

and admire the pretty pictures (or rerun the simulation!). Both executables can be typically found in /usr/local/bin directory. The client accepts a Visual3 input file, either redirected to its standard input, or saved in a default visual3.in.

Input

pV3 client accepts the following keywords as commands:

a) Derived from the number of element nodes.
b) Takes x-axis as the axis of symmetry.

As an example, consider the input file listed below:

hydra(test)% cat visual3.in
directory /Users/behr/work/ohio.0480
source minf.space
 
mxyz mxyz.space
data data.out
mrng mrng.complete
 
debug on
moving on
ndf 4
nrec 5
 
srng 1 inflow
srng 2 outflow
srng 3 right
srng 4 left
srng 5 free surface
srng 6 bottom

Known Problems

• Zoom box (+ key in 3D window) doesn't display properly.
• The display may initially come up with an unuseable view - hit Home key to correct.
• Buffer used to store boundary faces which do not belong to any RNG may overflow for large meshes. The workaround is to complete the RNG definitions.
• pV3 2.00 is out; front end needs to be updated as soon as PVM 3.4 is installed.