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ParaView#

ParaView is an open-source generic visualization application for scientific purposes. It can be executed in a client-server model to facilitate the use of remote powerful parallel computers. In the following we describe how it can be used by running the server component on fviz1 and the client on your local machine.

Availability / Target HPC systems#

ParaView is also available on Fritz frontend nodes via the environment module paraview/5.11.2; however, we recommend to run it (specifically the server component) on fviz1. You can use the following job script on Fritz to allocate 8 cores of fviz1 and execute pvserver with 8 MPI processes.

#!/bin/bash -l
#
#SBATCH --nodes=1
#SBATCH --ntasks-per-node=8
#SBATCH --cpus-per-task=1
#SBATCH --time=2:00:00
#SBATCH --partition=vis
#SBATCH --export=NONE

unset SLURM_EXPORT_ENV

module load paraview/5.11.2

mpiexec -n 8 pvserver

Alternatively, you can allocate fviz1 via salloc with --partition=vis for an interactive run of pvserver. The standard output contains information (complete hostname of fviz1 and the port) required to establish the client-server connection. Now you can execute the client (paraview) on your local machine and attempt to connect to the running server processes through Menu -> File -> Connect, or using the paraviewconnection icon. On the Choose Server Configuration dialog, choose Add Server and insert the Host and Port obtained from the standard output of the server on fviz1. Subsequently, click on Configure and then Save. Now you can select the saved connection in the list and initiate the connection. Note that it may take up to a minute to establish the connection.

Notes#

If you are not within the FAU network and cannot use a VPN service, you can use an SSH tunnel to connect to the server as explained in the following:

  1. Allocate fviz1 interactively through salloc.

  2. In a terminal, connect to fviz1 using the command

  3. In the terminal from which you logged in at fviz1, load the module paraview/5.11.2 and run pvserver with the number of CPU cores allocated with salloc (in this example assuming 8 processors)

    • mpiexec -n 8 pvserver --force-offscreen-rendering --mesa

  4. In the Choose Server Configuration dialog, add a server with Host and Port equal to localhost and 11111, respectively.

Further information#