SSH-Enabled ParaView

Abstract

ParaView is a very powerful visualization tool used by many in the Department of Defense (DoD) high performance computing (HPC) community. It is both fast and flexible. It performs well on a user’s desktop, but it can also scale to take advantage of clusters and large shared memory machines. Recently, ParaView has been adapted to run on the Linux clusters at the US Army Research Laboratory DoD Supercomputing Resource Center (ARL DSRC) using the Load Sharing Facility (LSF) batch queues. This method makes heavy use of Secure Shell (SSH) port forwarding to move data between the cluster nodes and the user’s desktop. The method is fast, convenient, and secure. Unfortunately, not everyone can use SSH port forwarding. For example, some users may not have access to servers that allow port-forwarded traffic. Also, there are users that are specifically banned from initiating a port forward from their desktop. To solve this problem, we have developed a version of ParaView that does not use TCP/IP sockets between the client and the server. Instead, the data is passed through the SSH standard in/out. If the user wishes to use a batch queue, a helper script handles the communication between the login node and the nodes that are allocated to the user. This paper describes the implementation of an SSHenabled ParaView. It then empirically compares our version to various other methods of running ParaView in the DoD HPC environment. Finally, it helps guide HPC users to determine the method that best fits their needs. This work benefits the DoD HPC community by making ParaView client/server available to users that have been previously unable to use it.