Submitting TecPlot Jobs

Helium currently offers TecPlot 360 for use on the cluster. One may use the Matlab environment by loading the appropriate module:

[user@helum:~]$ module load tecplot_2013R1

While it is possible to run TecPlot interactively, which can be especially useful for prototyping a job, please remember that login nodes are a shared resource and are intended for launching jobs or prototyping smaller versions of jobs you intend to run. It is not advisable to use interactive sessions for long-running, compute-intensive jobs unless one uses a qlogin session to do so.

You can run Tecplot 360 in batch mode to create plots without displaying any graphics to the screen. Note that on our Linux-based cluster, batch TecPlot jobs should be invoked using the "-mesa" option as some OpenGL resources are not available in batch mode.

A guide to scripting for TecPlot is available here: TecPlot 360 Scripting Guide.

Here is a simple example of using Tecplot in batch mode. This example creates an exported JPEG of a cylinder. Use "qsub tecplot.sh" to submit to SGE.

SGE TecPlot script: tecplot.sh

#!/bin/bash
# -------------------------------------
#$ -N TecPlot-test        # Job Name
#$ -j y                   # combine stderr & stdout into stdout
#$ -o $JOB_NAME.o$JOB_ID  # Name of the output file (eg. myMPI.oJobID)TecPlot360-Scripting-Guide.pdf
#$ -q UI                  # Queue
#$ -cwd                   # Start job in submission directory
# -------------------------------------
# Note the -b -mesa (b = batch, -mesa to turn of GL rendering)
tec360 -b -mesa cylinder.mcr

Here is the corresponding TecPlot macro file that is referenced in the above job script:

TecPlot macro: cylinder.mcr

 
#!MC 1400
# Created by Tecplot 360 build 14.0.2.35002
$!CREATECIRCULARZONE IMAX = 10 JMAX = 25 KMAX = 10 X = 0 Y = 3 Z1 = 0 Z2 = 1 RADIUS = 1 XVAR = 1 YVAR = 2 ZVAR = 3 
$!FIELDLAYERS USETRANSLUCENCY = NO 
$!FIELDLAYERS SHOWSHADE = NO 
$!FIELDLAYERS SHOWEDGE = NO 
$!ALTERDATA EQUATION = '{q} = sin(x*y+z*x)'
$!FIELDMAP [1]  SURFACES{SURFACESTOPLOT = EXPOSEDCELLFACES} 
$!FIELDLAYERS SHOWCONTOUR = YES 
$!GLOBALCONTOUR 1  VAR = 4 
$!CONTOURLEVELS RESETTONICE CONTOURGROUP = 1 APPROXNUMVALUES = 15 
$!THREEDVIEW PSIANGLE = 122.217 THETAANGLE = -146.263 ALPHAANGLE = 15.9724 VIEWERPOSITION { X = 8.080027914835405 Y = 15.09840323951778 Z = -8.667848498664521 }
$!VIEW PUSH 
$!EXPORTSETUP EXPORTFORMAT = JPEG IMAGEWIDTH = 900 USESUPERSAMPLEANTIALIASING = YES EXPORTFNAME = 'cylinder.jpeg'
$!EXPORT EXPORTREGION = CURRENTFRAME