Visualization: Difference between revisions

#First, install the same ParaView version as the one available on the cluster you will be using. Log into Cedar or Graham and start a serial GPU interactive job:

::The job should automatically start on one of GPU interactive nodes.

# At the prompt (that is now running inside your job), load the ParaView GPU+EGL module, unset your display variable so that ParaView does not attempt to use the X11 rendering context, and start the ParaView server:

Wait for the server to be ready to accept client connection.

#Make a note of the node (in this case cdr347) and the port (usually 11111) and in another terminal on your laptop (on Mac/Linux; in Windows use a terminal emulator), link the port 11111 on your laptop and the same port on the compute node (make sure to use the correct compute node).

#Start ParaView on your laptop, go to File -> Connect (or click on the green Connect button in the toolbar) and then click Add Server. You'll need to point ParaView to your local port 11111, so you can do something like name = cedar, server type = Client/Server, host = localhost, port = 11111, then click Configure, then select Manual and click Save.

Once the remote is added to the configuration, simply select the server from the list and click Connect. The first terminal window that read "Accepting connection ..." will now read "Client connected".

#Open a file in ParaView (it'll point you to the remote filesystem) and visualize it as usual.

An important setting in ParaView's preferences is Render View -> Remote/Parallel Rendering Options -> Remote Render Threshold. If you set it to default (20MB) or similar, small rendering will be done on your laptop's GPU, the rotation with a mouse will be fast, but anything modestly intensive (under 20MB) will be shipped to your laptop and -- depending on your connection -- visualization might be slow. If you set it to 0MB, all rendering will be remote including rotation, so you'll be really using the cluster's GPU for everything, good for large data processing but not so good for interactivity. You'll need to play with this setting to see what works best for you.