Paraview client/server display not accessible message

Hi,

My university has a computer cluster. They installed the Paraview server on the cluster. I perform the following steps to use Paraview as a client/server environment.

  1. I ssh to the cluster
  2. I request a dynamic allocation: salloc -t 30 -p defq -n 16
  3. I type the command “srun hostname” to check which node was allocated, for example cpu001
  4. I ssh to that node “ssh cpu001”
  5. I load the paraview module, module load paraview 5.8.0
  6. I run pvserver “mpirun -n 16 pvserver --force-offscreen-rendering”
  7. I open another terminal and setup the tunnel to that node “ssh -L 11111:cpu001:11111”

I load Paraview client on my local computer and I connect to the Paraview server on the cluster

I get the following message: “Display is not accessible on the server side. Remote rendering will be disabled.”

I click OK and I can use Paraview but it is very slow. I believe this is because all the rendering is performed on my local computer and not on the server. What do I need to do so that the rendering is performed by the server?

2 Likes

Two possibilities:

  1. There is a Xorg server running on your server and you need to use it by specifying the DISPLAY var
  2. You need to use headless offscreen rendering

https://kitware.github.io/paraview-docs/latest/cxx/Offscreen.html