Paraview

 Features

Paraview is an open-source, multi-platform data analysis and visualization application. It is developped by Kitware. The version installed on the cluster is built with MPI support; therefore it can be started on several nodes of the cluster in parallel mode.

  Installation & documentation

Paraview version 5.4.1 is installed on the cluster (compiled with openmpi-gcc) .

Documentation: see also this site.

  Local Installation

For Fedora users, Paraview can be installed on their workstation. To do this, yum install paraview. If the version doesn't match with the version installed on nef, you can download a binary from the paraview website.

  Documentation

Documentation is available online.

  Usage

On the nef cluster, two versions of paraview are installed ; one compiled with opengl (can be used on gpu nodes or with remote display) , and one with mesa (for offline rendering). Both versions are available through a module (type module avail to see the current versions)

The usual way to use paraview on nef is to start the client (paraview binary) on your workstation, start a paraview server (pvserver) on nef and then use the client to connect to the server.

  Batch mode usage

To start the Paraview server, you have to use a script like this (paraview.sh):

#!/bin/sh
server=`hostname`
echo "The server is listening on host $server "
source /etc/profile.d/modules.sh
module load paraview/5.4.1-mesa
module load mpi/openmpi-1.10.7-gcc
mpirun --prefix $MPI_HOME $PARAVIEW_DIR/bin/pvserver --use-offscreen-rendering

Then, to start paraview server on 4 nodes: oarsub -l /nodes=4,walltime=2:0:0 ./paraview.sh

The server will be started on all the cores of the 4 nodes, but a single instance will listen to client connections. To know the name of the listening node, use oarpeek [job id].

 nef:>oarpeek 407086
-- Info - Your job is in Running state ! --
-- Info - Command is : cat /home/nniclaus/paraview/OAR.407086.stdout 
-- Info - Output is : 
The server is listening on host nef086 
Waiting for client...
Connection URL: cs://nef086:11111
Accepting connection(s): nef086:11111

In this example, the listening node is nef086, so on the paraview client , you have to connect to nef086.inria.fr using the connect button ( if this is the first time you use this server, you have to use Add server, and put nef086 in Host and Name. Then use the Manual Startup type and save)