[Paraview] Paraviewweb and Amazon EC2 instance: X display, GPU option, parallel visualization, launcher...

[jlih]

Hi Scott,

Thanks for your answers and recommendations.


When I complied and installed Paraview on my two instances, I turned the Python option ON but did not turn off VTK-USE-X.  I will go ahead to recompile Paraview again and check the Python launcher.


Thanks again.

Jing

________________________________
From: Scott Wittenburg <scott.wittenburg at kitware.com>
Sent: Friday, September 5, 2014 12:05 PM
To: jlih
Cc: paraview at paraview.org
Subject: Re: [Paraview] Paraviewweb and Amazon EC2 instance: X display, GPU option, parallel visualization, launcher...

Hi Jing,

   I'm responding to your questions inline.  Thanks!


On Fri, Sep 5, 2014 at 8:04 AM, jlih <jlih at masonlive.gmu.edu<mailto:jlih at masonlive.gmu.edu>> wrote:

Dear all,

I have installed Paraviewweb on an Amazon EC2 GPU instance based on the installation guide at:

http://www.paraview.org/ParaView3/Doc/Nightly/www/js-doc/index.html#!/guide/paraviewweb_on_aws_ec2. The webpages under "apps" can show up correctly. Now I am trying to install the parallel visualization. Here are a few questions I want to verify:


Since the instructions you referenced describe installing a binary version, I assume that's what you did.  However, those instructions assumed an instance with a graphics card, hence all the instructions specific to NVidia.  If you have chosen an instance without a graphics card, you can't use the binary installation of ParaView, instead you'll need to compile ParaView yourself with support for OSMesa.

1. When I run pvpython on the GPU instance, I got the error message saying "bad X display..". I guess this occurs when the instance does not have a "real graphics" card and "off screen rendering" option should be used. My question is will this error affect the Paraviewweb application?


ParaViewWeb is just ParaView with Python turned on.  If you get a binary version, this is already done for you.  If you compile it yourself, make sure to enable Python during the configure stage.  At any rate, yes, ParaViewWeb is affected the same as ParaView by not having a graphics card.

2.  I have installed Paraview (not Paraviewweb) on two other instances (without GPU) which run MPI without any issues. I would like to use those two instances as a part of the parallel visualization framework. Should I install the Paraviewweb on those two instances as well? Or I just need to change the machine configuration file to include the two instances?


If you installed ParaView on those two instances, and if those installations of ParaView include Python, then you're good to go.  Unless they don't have graphics cards and you installed the binary version, as mentioned above.

3.  It seems GPU is needed for the instance when I configured the Paraviewweb on Amazon  EC2. There is a option for NVIDIA.. But  I read this document:

http://www.paraview.org/ParaView3/Doc/Nightly/www/js-doc/index.html#!/guide/os_mesa which says GPU may not be necessary. Is this applicable to Amazon EC2 instances?


Yep, it is.  But again, you have to compile ParaView yourself.  See the guide you referenced above for information on how to do that.  Also there's a ParaView wiki page<http://www.paraview.org/Wiki/ParaView_And_Mesa_3D> with information on that.

4.  Launcher (

http://www.paraview.org/ParaView3/Doc/Nightly/www/js-doc/index.html#!/guide/parallel_app). I'm not sure if I should modify the  pw.session.public.fields if I am going to use the default Parallel example provided by Paraviewweb to start with.


The ParaViewWeb on EC2 documentation describes setting up the Jetty launcher, which is totally fine.  In that case, you would set up a few key/vals to allow that launcher to start the server side application you're interested, the parallel visualization launcher in your case.  That's all covered in the guide you linked.  Then you would indeed need to make sure you add "file" to those session fields as the documentation states.

On the other hand, you might want to consider using the Python launcher instead of the Jetty launcher.  It comes within ParaView so you don't have another software stack to worry about, and it has all the same capabilities and more.  For those reasons, we currently recommend the Python launcher over the Jetty one.  You can find information about the Python launcher here<http://www.paraview.org/ParaView3/Doc/Nightly/www/js-doc/index.html#!/guide/py_launcher>.

Sorry about throwing out so many  questions but Paraviewweb is a very interesting application to explore.


No worries, thanks for your interest!  Hopefully you now have what you need to get started.

Cheers,
Scott

Thanks,

Jing

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