Trouble Running ParaView 5.13.3 on HPC Cluster: Missing libGL.so.1 and libglapi.so.0

ParaView Support
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1

Hi all,

I’m trying to install and run ParaView 5.13.3 on a Linux-based HPC system (Stanford’s Sherlock cluster), but I’m running into some shared library issues. I’ve tested both:

  • The standard MPI Linux build: ParaView-5.13.3-MPI-Linux-Python3.10-x86_64
  • The OSMesa (headless) build: ParaView-5.13.3-osmesa-MPI-Linux-Python3.10-x86_64

When I run pvpython from either installation, I get errors like the following:

error while loading shared libraries: libGL.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Or, for the OSMesa version:

error while loading shared libraries: libglapi.so.0: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Running ldd on pvpython-real confirms that these shared objects are missing. I tried loading system modules like libglvnd, xorg, and mesa, but no luck so far.

Is there a way to run the OSMesa version of ParaView fully headless on a CPU-only HPC cluster without needing libGL.so.1?

I’m mainly interested in using pvpython for batch visualization and post-processing in an automated pipeline (no GUI).

Thanks in advance for your help!

2

libglapi.so.0 is provided in the binary package of the headless version:

ParaView-5.13.3-osmesa-MPI-Linux-Python3.10-x86_64/lib/mesa/libglapi.so

But for some reason the rpath was not set correctly. You can work around this issue with:

LD_PRELOAD=./lib/mesa/libglapi.so ./bin/pvserver-real