Set up of paraview server on to use GPUs on Amazon AWS?

ParaView Support
1

Hi all,

I’m hoping to run pvserver on an Amazon EC2 instance with an Nvidia M60 GPU on it. Unfortunately, I’m having some issues which I believe are related to X displays on the EC2 instance. When I try to render something on the server after connecting with paraview running on my laptop, I see:

Display is not accessible on the server side.
Remote rendering will be disabled.

Why is this? What info can I provide to diagnose this issue?

1 Like
2

Hi Gavin,

It’s hard to say without more information. Maybe you’re missing something really simple like just making sure to export the display environment variable before starting pvserver?

export DISPLAY=:0.0

Or maybe the issue is more involved, like the graphics card drivers aren’t installed/verified, or something else.

You might find some documentation from paraviewweb relevant: https://kitware.github.io/paraviewweb/docs/graphics_on_ec2_g2.html

There are some other docs on that site as well which you may find interesting/useful.

Hope this helps,

Scott

3

Ideally you want to use an EGL build of ParaView.

5

Hi Gavin,

If you use EGL, there is no need for an X Server, and then your instance needs fewer packages installed, no need to set the DISPLAY environment variable, among other things.

You can read a blog post about it here:

https://blog.kitware.com/off-screen-rendering-through-the-native-platform-interface-egl/

At the end of that article, there is a link to some updated information as well.

Hope this helps,

Scott

1 Like
6

Thanks for the advice Mr. Wittenburg. That was close to the answer: there are some intermediate steps. It was more of an issue with the xorg.conf file.

I solved it by first making sure the latest nvidia drivers were installed, and running nvidia’s x configuration script with the following options:

sudo nvidia-xconfig --enable-all-gpus --use-display-device=none

which is documented here.

Then, you must manually modify the xorg.conf file and remove the ServerLayout and Screen blocks from the file, according to here.

Then, start an X server on the GPU on display 0 with:

export DISPLAY=:0
sudo X :0 &

Then pvserver should just include the argument:

pvserver <other_options> -display localhost:0

As for running on both GPUs with MPI… that’s yet to be figured out.

Thanks again! :smiley:

2 Likes
7

Why is EGL preferred?

8

OK, this all makes sense now. Thanks. And I assume that would make it easier to render on both GPUs?

9

Well, for rendering on multiple GPUs, I may have to let someone else with chime in. This article could be helpful though, as it seems to describe something similar to what you want:

https://devblogs.nvidia.com/egl-eye-opengl-visualization-without-x-server/

Cheers,

Scott

1 Like