ParaView

ParaView is a parallel, scalable, visualization package from Kitware. Effectively, it is a GUI interface to Kitware's Visualization ToolKit (VTK). Thus most ParaView operations have a VTK equivalent. See https://paraview.org/ for more information.

Running

To launch a single threaded ParaView instance, first connect via VNC, then use vglconnect to connect to one of the compute machines:

 vglconnect -s viz003

Add the desired version of ParaView to your environment (the below example will get the "default" version)

 soft add @paraview

and launch the GUI:

 vglrun paraview

Viewing Serial Cases

Within the GUI, open the .pht file that corresponds to your case. The .pht file will appear in the "pipeline browser" within ParaView. To actually see your model, click the "apply" button on the properties tab. To visualize a particular flow property, choose that property from the dropdown menu in the "active variable controls" toolbar, and then click the button corresponding to the type of visualization you want (contour, slice, etc.) in the "common" toolbar. The properties of the visualization element can then be controlled in the "properties" tab.

For more help with the ParaView GUI, see ParaView's tutorial.

Parallel (Client/Server) Mode

One viz node

To visualize cases in parallel on one viz node, start the ParaView server in parallel with

 mpirun -np N pvserver

• N is the number of processes, maximum of 8 on one viz node.

Multiple viz nodes

To visualize using more than one viz node, start a ParaView server utilizing multiple viz nodes with

 mpirun --prefix A -x DISPLAY=":0" -x PATH -x LD_LIBRARY_PATH -hostfile ~matthb2/hostfile-ib -np 16 pvserver

• --prefix A mpirun is located at A/bin/mpirun; the which mpirun command will tell you this. Make sure to add one of the @paraview-verison-number macros from softenv first, as it will set the best mpirun path for that version. A is the 'prefix' directory. In traditional unix, the prefix directory contains bin, etc, include, lob, share directories associated with the program.

The -x flag means 'copy a variable' from the machine you run mpirun from (the headnode) to those it's starting processes on (the slaves).

• -x DISPLAY=":0" Location of the X-server. Assumes localhost. Could do viz002:0 to use graphics card on viz002 instead. 0 is the default graphics hardware, whereas 1, 2, etc could be VNC servers or other software display.

• -x PATH The lookup path for the binary. PATH is an environment variable maintained by the shell.

• -x LD_LIBRARY_PATH The lookup path for shared libraries. Same as PATH, but for dynamically-linked libraries.

• -hostfile ~matthb2/hostfile-ib File specifying list of hosts. Contents are lines that look like 172.18.4.11 slots=8. This is mpi-implementation specific. IP address of viz001, for instance, and the number of cores it has (slots=8).

• -np 16 Total number of processes that mpirun should start. Maximum is 16 when using two viz nodes (8 per node).

Connecting to server

When the ParaView server starts, it will say it is accepting connections on some port. Connect to that port from a ParaView client.

Related Topics

Paraview: Run on Remote Machine

ParaView Tricks

Paraview Automation with Python

Paraview with syncio