Visualization

Overview

The Remote Visualization Service - or RVS for short - is meant to provide remote rendering capabilities for users wanting to perform (interactive) visualization of datasets stored at SARA, e.g. simulation output from a run on Huygens. The user runs visualization applications on the RVS nodes at SARA instead of on their local desktop machine.

This has a number of advantages:

• The data to be visualized can be read directly from the storage at SARA, without having to be transferred to the user's local machine. Only a desktop image is transfered to the user, using VNC.
• Multiple RVS nodes can be used in parallel to provide increased visualization capabilities, in terms of GPU power and available memory. Note that this mode of usage requires application support.
• A stack of visualization software is maintained by SARA, freeing you, the user, from having to spend time on this issue. In principal, user-written applications based on OpenGL are also supported.

Note that the RVS cluster is different from the GPU cluster. The former is meant for providing interactive GPU-accelerated visualization, the latter for performing batch-oriented GPU-accelerated computations.

High-level usage

Using the remote visualization service more or less follows the following workflow:

1. The user logs in on the RVS head node and reserves one or more nodes
2. After reservation is successful (usually instantaneous, if nodes are available) a VNC server will have been started on one of the nodes
3. The user connects to the VNC server
4. From the remote desktop the user launches the preferred visualization application and loads his/her data. The output of the hardware-accelerated rendering on the RVS node is transparently captured, integrated into the VNC image stream, which is sent in compressed form through the VNC connection.