ParaView/Interactive

From ScientificComputing
Jump to: navigation, search

You can start the graphical user interface (GUI) of ParaView on one of the login nodes of Euler. This can be useful to visualize and browse data. In order to start the GUI of ParaView on a login node, you first need to establish an SSH connection with X11 forwarding enabled.

ssh -Y username@hostname

With username being your ETH username.

Interactive session with ParaView 4.1.0

First you need to load the required modules

module load qt/4.8.4 python/2.7.6 ffmpeg/2.3.3 r/3.0.2 open_mpi/1.6.5 netcdf/4.3.1 paraview/4.1.0

and then you can start the GUI with the paraview command.

paraview

Please only use the GUI for looking at your data. Computation need to be submitted through the batch system.

Interactive session with ParaView 5.5.2

For starting an interactive session with ParaView 5.5.2, you would need to load the following modules

module load new gcc/4.8.2 mesa/12.0.6 open_mpi/1.6.5 qt/5.8.0 hdf5/1.8.12 netcdf/4.3.2 boost/1.62.0 ffmpeg/2.3.3 lz4/1.8.2 eigen/3.2.1 glew/2.1.0 jsoncpp/1.8.4 protobuf/3.6.0 sqlite/3.15.0 paraview/5.5.2_gui

then you can start the GUI with the paraview command

paraview

When connecting from a Linux client to the cluster, the GUI works without problems. Because the implementation of the X libraries on Mac (XQuartz) and Windows (Xming, Cygwin/X, MobaXterm) is incomplete and misses the MIT-SHM extension, the GUI won't work. As a workaround, we recommend to install Ubuntu in a virtualbox VM and connect to the Euler cluster from there.

Installing Ubuntu on a VM in a Mac: https://www.dev2qa.com/how-to-install-ubuntu-on-virtualbox-mac/

Installing Ubuntu on a VM on Windows: https://itsfoss.com/install-linux-in-virtualbox/

This workaround has been tested on a Mac and resolved the issue. To avoid this workaround, we strongly recommend to use ParaView 5.6.0.

Interactive session with ParaView 5.6.0

Due to the issues that arised, when using ParaView 5.5.2 with a Mac or Windows computer, we decided to install precompiled binaries for ParaView 5.6.0. For starting an interactive session with ParaView 5.6.0, you would need to load the following modules

module load new gcc/4.8.2 mesa/12.0.6 paraview/5.6.0

then you can start the GUI with one of the following 3 paraview commands:

paraview --mesa
paraview --mesa-llvm
paraview --mesa-swr

The mesa parameter determines, which rendering engine is used.