Remote rendering using VNC and ParaView

Remote rendering is also possible using the Virtual Network Computing (VNC, e.g. ​TigerVNC or ​TurboVNC) package. We advice you to use the strudel application to access an interactive desktop session on JURECA. See section vnc3d for a detailed description of a VNC session on JURECA.

Strudel provides you with the options

1. to login to JURECA - login node (vis:2xGPU) to run the vnc-server on a visualization login node, or
2. to JURECA - compute nodes (vis 2xGPU) to run the vnc-server on JURECA's visualization batch nodes:

connect to		pro	contra
JURECA - login node (vis:2xGPU)		rendering on GPU large memory no batch job needed no accounting (unless you start a parallel pvserver) pvserver may run in parallel on JURECA's compute nodes or visualization nodes	resources shared between users in case of pvserver running separately: the node pvserver is running on has to be explicitly specified in the Server Configuration Menu of the ParaView GUI
JURECA - compute nodes (vis:2xGPU)		dedicated resource rendering on GPU large memory pvserver may (should!) run in parallel on JURECA's visualization nodes as described here. ParaView GUI client and pvserver running on the same node, => connect to localhost:11111	accounting

Starting the ParaView GUI on the remote desktop

In case you startet the VNC server with the option '-profile vis', your VNCViewer should look like this:

Now, just double-click on the ParaView-Icon to start the ParaView client.

Starting a pvserver on JURECA's compute nodes

In this section we show how to use ParaView's server side rendering capabilities on JURECA's compute nodes in a sample session step by step.

1. Open a terminal and load the modules providing the ParaView software

   bash-4.2$ module load Stages/Current intel-para ParaView/5.0.1-OSMesa
   

2. Next, we allocate some resources for our ParaView server, and run the ParaView server (in this example session on 1 node, using 24 tasks)

   bash-4.2$ salloc --partition=devel --nodes=1 --time=00:20:00
   salloc: Pending job allocation 1711109
   salloc: job 1711109 queued and waiting for resources
   salloc: job 1711109 has been allocated resources
   salloc: Granted job allocation 1711109
   bash-4.2$ srun --nodes=1 --ntasks=24 pvserver
   

which will produce the following output from the ParaView server:

Waiting for client...
Connection URL: cs://jrc0036:11111
Accepting connection(s): jrc0036:11111

where

jrc0036:11111 

is the hostname and portnumber on JURECA the server will listen to.

3. As a next step, click the Connect button in the ParaView GUI and configure a server with the corresponding hostname and portnumber as described here

Starting a pvserver on JURECA's visualization nodes

In this section we show how to use ParaView's server side rendering capabilities on JURECA's visualization nodes in a sample session step by step.

1. open a terminal and load the modules providing the ParaView software

   bash-4.2$ module load Stages/Current intel-para ParaView
   

and set the DISPLAY environment variable as follows

bash-4.2$ export DISPLAY=:0.0

2. Next, we allocate some resources for our ParaView server (this step has to be omitted in case you started a VNC session on the visualization batch nodes via strudel, since strudel allready allocated some resources for you)

   bash-4.2$ salloc -N 2 -p vis --gres gpu:2 --start-xserver     
   

   and run the ParaView server (in this example session on 2 nodes, using 48 tasks):

   bash-4.2$ srun --cpu_bind=none --ntasks=48 --gres=gpu:0 vglrun pvserver --use-offscreen-rendering
   

which will produce the following output from the ParaView server:

Waiting for client...
Connection URL: cs://jrc1391:11111
Accepting connection(s): jrc1391:11111

where

jrc1391:11111 

is the hostname and portnumber on JURECA the server will listen to.

3. As a next step, click the Connect button in the ParaView GUI and configure a server with the corresponding hostname and portnumber as described here