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.