Creating a LatVolMesh with scalar data by itself shouldn't take up that much memory. I ran a quick test on my workstation (OS X 10.7). Here, creating a 128^3 LatVolMesh added approximately 36 MB to real memory and approximately 41 MB to virtual memory. Memory usage increased greatly once the field was visualized, as you can see from the activity monitor (prof3.png). Turning off rendering of nodes and edges in the mesh (prof4.png) reduced memory usage by the graphics system somewhat.

We are rewriting the rendering framework in SCIRun 5, and offloading much of the graphics processing on to the graphics hardware. Preliminary testing and profiling of the SCIRun 5 prototype are showing that a similar field can be rendered with much less system memory.

Ayla