[Paraview] Connecting to Catalyst-Enabled Simulation Running on Remote Cluster

[Timo Oster]

Hi Andy,

I have succeeded in getting it to work by starting a pvserver process on
every node alongside with the simulation instead of just one pvserver on
the login node. I then have a ssh tunnel from the worker nodes to the
login node, and from the login node to my local computer. This appears
to be rather resource-intensive though, and I wonder if there is a more
efficient way to do it. Is such a great number of pvservers really
needed? If somebody has any additional information, that would be very
helpful. Searching the internet for this question hasn't brought up much
helpful information yet.

Regards,

Timo

On 05/19/2015 05:09 PM, Andy Bauer wrote:
> Hi Timo,
> 
> There's a couple of steps that need to be added when connecting to a
> Catalyst-enabled simulation that's been run through a batch job on a
> cluster. This "should" be the same as just running pvserver through a
> batch job and connecting to that. The basics are that there's an
> executable/script that runs on the login node that the batch job
> connects to. Your GUI connects to the login node and has the ports
> forwarded properly through the executable/script to your pvserver. Now
> if your pvserver is running on the login node then it will have to use
> the above connection mechanism to connect to your Catalyst-enabled
> simulation. There may be some emails or something on the wiki that has
> information on the connection executable/script but I haven't tried any
> of that in several years so I'm not sure where it would be. Maybe
> someone else will chime in that's done this more recently than me.
> 
> Good luck and let us know how it goes.
> 
> Andy
> 
> On Mon, May 18, 2015 at 8:48 AM, Timo Oster <timo.oster at ovgu.de
> <mailto:timo.oster at ovgu.de>> wrote:
> 
>     Hi all,
> 
>     in an effort to enable live visualization of our simulation code, I have
>     written a Catalyst adaptor for it. The live visualization is working
>     great when the ParaView client runs on the same machine as the
>     simulation, even when the simulation runs in parallel using mpi.
> 
>     Now I want to do live visualization of a simulation running on a remote
>     cluster. I am able to get this to work for the simulation running on the
>     login node of the cluster:
> 
>     1. Tunnel an ssh connection of port 11111 to the cluster:
>         ssh -L 11111:localhost:11111 server
>     2. In the shell that opens, start a paraview server (in the background
>     with '&')
>     3. Run the simulation with mpirun (simulation runs only on login node)
>     4. Start my local ParaView client and connect to localhost:11111 to
>     connect to the remote pvserver through the ssh tunnel
>     5. In the client, connect to Catalyst (port 22222)
>     6. A provider for the simulation is created and the live
>     visualization works
> 
>     Now I want to do the same for simulations started on the remote cluster
>     via the batch job system. In this scenario, the parallel processes of
>     the simulation will run on different (randomly chosen) nodes on the
>     cluster. How do I go about getting a connection from my local client to
>     the Catalyst instances running on those nodes?
> 
>     I imagine I will need to set up ssh tunnels from the nodes to the login
>     node where the pvserver is running. I've tried adding a ssh tunnel line
>     to the job script that is executed when the batch job starts. I've tried
>     forwarding and reverse-forwarding port 22222 (ssh -L and ssh -R) to no
>     avail. The best I get is "ERROR: In
>     /.../ParaView_git/VTK/Common/System/vtkSocket.cxx, line 206
>     vtkServerSocket (0x18e0930): Socket error in call to bind. Address
>     already in use."
> 
>     My knowledge in networking and ssh is limited, so any pointers to how I
>     would go about this are greatly appreciated.
> 
>     Regards,
> 
>     Timo
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