EnSight

Description

EnSight Gold provides a common tool for all scientific and engineering analysis, visualization, and communication. Key capabilities include postprocessing of all types of common analysis; handling of unstructured, structured and hybrid meshes, and particle data; broad feature set, including clips, isosurfaces, streamlines, vector arrows, elevated surfaces, model displacement, plotting, data queries, animation, and flow feature extraction; and direct output of images and animations.

EnSight Gold supports distributed geometry generation, making it suitable for visualizing complex structures from large scientific data sets.

The NCCS has purchased a single floating seat of EnSight Gold.

For more information, see the EnSight Gold web page.

Use

EnSight Gold operates in a client-server mode. Both client and server can reside on the same computer or separate computers. It is most important that the server process reside as close to the scientific data as possible. For visualizations involving more than 100 MB of data, it is suggested that users run the client process on their local machines and connect from a server process running on the Hawk cluster. To install EnSight Gold on a personal machine, please refer to the local installation section below.

EnSight Gold may be operated in a server-of-servers (SOS) mode. This uses multiple servers running in parallel to generate geometry from distributed data. Coordination of the multiple servers and communication back to the client is facilitated by a master server, or SOS, process. To run EnSight in SOS mode, please refer to the SOS section below.


Hawk

Basic Operation
Once installed, start the EnSight Gold client on your local machine.

localhost> ensight8 -cm

You will be prompted to start an EnSight server.

Log onto Hawk and start the EnSight Gold server. The environment state for EnSight Gold is easily set through the module command.

hawk> module load ensight
hawk> srun ensight8.server -c <localhost>

Personal Installation

SOS
On the local host, start the EnSight Gold client. The additional argument below ensures remote shell communication via SSH between client and server.

localhost> ensight8.client -cm -rsh ssh

On Hawk, decide how many nodes across which you wish to distribute data. Distribution can be accomplished via three methods: (1) EnSight’s auto_distribute feature, (2) EnSight’s unsupported “chopper” utility, or (3) user-supplied custom distribution programs. Please refer to the EnSight User Manual for details. Once the data have been distributed, allocate one more than the number of nodes on which the distributed data resides.

hawk> srun -A -N<#_of_server_nodes_plus_1>

The current version of EnSight requires specific identification of nodes used in SOS mode. Therefore, you must manually or automatically modify your EnSight case file with the explicit names of the nodes you were allocated via SLURM.

hawk> setenv | grep SLURM_NODELIST
hawk> ...modify Ensight casefile according to SLURM nodelist
hawk> srun -N1 ensight8.sos -c <localhost> -rsh ssh -case <casefile>

To expedite the connections between the SOS process and individual servers, use the following environment setting:

setenv ENSIGHT8_MAX_SOSTHREADS <#_of_server_nodes>