ParaView Overview

4.Enter your Linux user name and password for the cluster in the RGS login window. The desktop environment login window for the cluster appears on your local desktop.

5.Log in to the desktop environment window using your Linux user name and password. The desktop environment appears on your local desktop in the RGS Receiver window.

6.Open a terminal window in the desktop environment and enter the following command:

%sva_remote.sh "/usr/X11R6/lib/xscreensaver/atlantis -count 20"

The atlantis application display begins.

7.Exit the application to stop the application only. You can then restart the application using the same application command or another command, including a command with a different application. Cluster resources remain allocated.

To deallocate the cluster resources and stop the RGS process on the cluster, exit the desktop environment completely.

Provide input to the application while it is running using the local desktop keyboard and mouse. Display output from the application appears on your local desktop and simultaneously appears on the display device in the SVA.

Running Render and Display Applications Using ParaView

This section describes how to run a parallel visualization application on the SVA using both render and display nodes, using ParaView as a representative example.

Assumptions and Goal

This example assumes you have a rendering application such as ParaView to analyze, display, and enhance an existing data file for analysis. An application such as ParaView can run on a single workstation; however, it can also take advantage of the more powerful parallel features of the SVA to display data on a multi-tile display, and improve performance by distributing the rendering and compositing among the cluster nodes.

This example also assumes that you want to run the rendering application on the SVA while maintaining control remotely from a desktop that is outside the cluster.

You must have the cluster set up with the HP XC and the SVA software. You must also have your rendering application (in this example, ParaView) installed and properly configured on those nodes within the cluster that you will use for rendering and display. For ParaView, you must build the MPI version of ParaView to take advantage of the parallel features of the SVA before you install it on the SVA nodes. Note that ParaView is not provided as part of the SVA Kit.

You also must have the X Server on your local desktop configured to accept ParaView display output.

ParaView is an open source, multiplatform, extensible application designed for visualizing large datasets. This scalable application runs on single-processor workstations as well as on large parallel supercomputers. ParaView features include:

•Runs parallel on distributed and shared memory systems using MPI. These include workstation clusters, visualization systems, large servers, supercomputers, and so on.

•The user interface can run either on the root MPI node or on a separate workstation using client/server mode.

•ParaView uses the data parallel model, in which the data is broken into pieces to be processed by different processes. Most of the visualization algorithms function without any change when running in parallel.

•Supports both distributed rendering (where the results are rendered on each node and composited later using the depth buffer), local rendering (where the resulting polygons are collected on one node and rendered locally) and a combination of both (for example, level-of-detail models can be rendered locally whereas the full model is rendered in a distributed manner). This provides scalable rendering for large datasets without sacrificing performance when working with smaller datasets.

Running Render and Display Applications Using ParaView 35