Paraview Visualization

Paraview is a visualization package for large data sets. It overcomes the issue of poor performance of graphics over a network by splitting the processing and rendering over multiple servers. In this model, paraview can connect to your data on a remote system, process the graphics elements on the remote system, but render and display the graphics on your local workstation, taking advantage of hardware acceleration. In addition to having the processing done on a single server, paraview can use MPI to connect to multiple server nodes to process very large data sets. Paraview will submit itself as a job to a queue system on the processing servers. Typically, the only way to access compute nodes on an HPC system is through a queue system so this allows paraview to take advantage of those resources.

Paraview can be a little difficult to set up, particularly on Windows machines. First off, you must have passwordless SSH setup. There is no way to type a password when Paraview connects so this step is crucial. Second, you must pass Duo 2-factor credentials. On a Windows machine, Duo will auto push to your device, so you must have a device set up for that. For Mac and Linux machines you may enter a one-time Duo code, in addition to specifying "push". To make setup easier, a server configuration file for Argon is provided. You should download the servers definition file which sets up access to our systems.

You must download the paraview client binary of that same version. Paraview downloads are available at the Download | ParaView web page. 

To set up Paraview to use the HPC system, launch the Paraview client that was previously installed. Then follow the steps below. Note that the version shown here will likely look a little different, depending on version and OS used. 

After launching Paraview, click on the Connect to Server button.

On the next screen, click on Load Servers. Navigate to the pvsc file that you previously downloaded and load that file. The screen should then look similar to that below.

This screen will likely look different, depending on the server configs that you have already loaded. Select the "University of Iowa Argon" configuration and select Connect. There will be some options to select in the next screen and then Paraview will connect after pressing OK. The setup process takes a little while so be patient. If something goes wrong, a message box will provide information.