There are three functional Paraview installations:

1. A standard binary distribution Paraview-4.3.1 in /apps/chpc/compmech/ParaView-4.3.1-Linux-64bit/bin
2. A custom compiled Paraview-5.0.1 in apps/chpc/compmech/CFD/Paraview/bin
3. A standard binary distribution Paraview-5.3.0 in /apps/chpc/compmech/ParaView-5.3.0_bininstall

These are also available as modules, please use module avail. Please refer to the Paraview web site for instructions on using Paraview. For interactive graphics, an OpenGL-enabled environment will be required, therefore refer to the page on Remote Visualization for instructions on setting up a connection to the visualization node, and running Paraview with the VirtualGL wrapper. Paraview is an extremely versatile post-processor, and can be used as the primary visualization tool for a very wide range of applications and file formats, including OpenFOAM, MFix, SU2 and many others.

Paraview really comes into its own when it can make use of parallel processing (hence Paraview rather than Serialview, presumably). Limited testing has been done with the standard binary distribution of Paraview-5.3.0, which is installed in /apps/chpc/compmech/ParaView-5.3.0_bininstall. There is a module for it, module load chpc/compmech/Paraview/5.3.0 will set up the appropriate environment. There are several ways in which this version of Paraview can be used:

1. Run on a viz node (chpcviz1 or chpclic1) in single processor mode
2. Run in parallel on viz node
3. Run with dataserver parallel on a compute node, and the front end and render server in single process mode on a viz node
4. Run with dataserver parallel on a compute node, render server in parallel on the viz node and the front end on the viz node
5. Run with dataserver parallel on a compute node, render server in parallel on the viz node and the front end somewhere else

Not all of these methods work yet, but the ones that do, need the module loaded in each shell from which the process will be started.

Load the module, and type vglrun paraview at the command prompt.

• Open two terminals. Load the module in each.
• In one terminal, enter the command: vglrun mpiexec -np 6 pvserver –mpi –use-offscreen-rendering
• In the other, start paraview with vglrun paraview, then connect to the server (you have to set it up first in the connect menu). Then open your parallel data set. If your dataset is not inherently parallel, there is no point in using parallel visualisation. In OpenFOAM, leave your case decomposed, use the touch bananas.foam trick and load up the case as decomposed.
• Please do not use more than 6 parallel processes on the current viz nodes, which are interim stop-gap servers.
• Do monitor (with top or htop) the load on the servers, and avoid overloading them. In due course, a more formal queue for visualisation and better servers will be established.

The data server does not need any GPU hardware, which makes it possible to run it on compute nodes. The process is as follows:

• Get one or more compute nodes, either by means of an interactive PBS session, or a PBS batch job.
• On the compute node, load the Paraview module.
• From the master compute node (note down its hostname), start the Paraview server with the following command: mpiexec -np 24 pvserver –mpi –use-offscreen-rendering. If you need more than one compute node, use a machinefile. If you are at the point where you need more than one compute node, you should already know how to do this.
• On the viz node, start paraview with vglrun, as before.
• Setup the selected compute node as a server that you can connect to, and do so.
• This method gives reasonably good performance, especially if there is a lot of back end data processing involved.

• Get a compute node as before, load the module, and start up just the data server with the following command: mpiexec -np 24 pvdataserver –mpi
• On the viz node, open two terminals, load the module in each.
• In one terminal, start the render server with vglrun mpiexec -np 6 pvrenderserver –mpi –use-offscreen-rendering. Running the render server in parallel seems to provide a small improvement in performance.
• In the other window, start paraview with vglrun paraview.
• With the connection menu, set up a client / data server / render server connection with the appropriate hostnames and port numbers that you have meticulously noted down.
• Establish the connection.
• Load the parallel data set.

This is left as an exercise for the reader, and is a straightforward extension of the process up to this point. You will need ssh-tunneling to connect to the data server and render server. You can run the render server on the same machine as the remote front end (i.e. your desktop), but the amount of data to be transferred makes it totally impractical. The front end does not necessarily need to run on Linux.