For up-to-date visualization documentation, please visit Compute Canada's visualization wiki.
WestGrid provides remote visualization capabilities from most of its computational resources. Visualization applications may be run on compute nodes and the results displayed remotely using X Window tunnelling through an SSH client. However, the X Window System has significant overhead that can make graphics programs sluggish to use from remote computers having relatively low-bandwidth connections to WestGrid. To help improve the responsiveness of OpenGL-based graphics applications, it is possible to use GPU (graphics processing unit) enabled nodes (visualization nodes) that have been configured to render output to a display-less GPU, with the resulting images displayed on the user's desktop computer using a lightweight display client. Set up and use of the WestGrid remote visualization capabilities are given below. This includes:
- Use of X11 for GUI interaction and basic remote visualization (slow; not recommended for complex graphics)
- Use of the GPU nodes for interactive remote visualization via VNC (recommended; requires a VNC client)
- Use of the GPU nodes by connecting Paraview running on your Desktop directly to a rendering node (recommended; requires a ParaView client)
If you are interested in a general discussion about your Visualization options within WestGrid, please refer to the Visualization Quickstart guide. If you want to see a summary of all related visualization resource in WestGrid, please refer to the main Visualization page.