ParaView MPI Autostart issues on Mac OS

I am having quite peculiar issues with running paraview in parallel on Mac OS. I’ve downloaded the 5.8.0 version of paraview and launched without any difficulties. I have an 8-core MBPro and so I tried to launch the MPI autostart, which spawned 8 separate processes of pvserver and I was able to do my work without any problems.

However, while closing paraview, the spawned pvserver applications would be still running, and so I had to forcefully close them. Since then, if I try to autostart paraview with MPI support, this is the message I receive:
Generic Warning: In /Users/kitware/dashboards/buildbot-slave/a64f5607/build/superbuild/paraview/src/Remoting/ServerManager/vtkSMSession.cxx, line 288

Failed to automatically launch ‘pvserver’ for multi-core support. Defaulting to local session.

What is even more interesting, is that I tried ParaView 5.6.0, which worked in MPI until I had to close the application. For second run, it would never start again in MPI.

I have reverted to use pvserver and call with mpiexec provided in /Applications/ParaView/Contents/bin, however once I run ./mpiexec -n 8 ./pvserver --mpi (or without suffix --mpi), the terminal just hangs and doesn’t do anything.

Is anyone experiencing such issues? What could be the source of the problem?

Welcome to the ParaView Discourse forum, Matus. What version of macOS are you running?

Thank you Cory. macOS Catalina (10.15.4).

Any solution for this?

My guess is that some security mechanism in macOS Catalina is preventing the auto starting of pvserver. I don’t have a Catalina machine on which to test this out though.

Works correctly for me. I am on Mojave 10.14.6. Tested with ParaView 5.8.0, used the GUI Preferences “Enable Auto MPI”.