2022-12-15 VisIt and OSPRay Studio for Scientific Visualisation (hvis1w22)

Participants are expected to bring their own laptops. There are no PCs installed in the course room!
We strongly recommend to choose travel options and hotels with the possibility to cancel (even close to the event) because we might be forced to deliver the course as an online course.

Contents

The course aims at presenting two applications, VisIt and OSPRay Studio, among those offered for general-purpose scientific visualisation (scivis) to all users of LRZ.
In particular, through the usage of remote servers, these allow for multi-node distributed renderings and are thus mostly indicated for large-scale production leveraging directly on LRZ supercomputers.
Yet the use of the HPC resources is flexible, so that small-scale data exploration is also easy and performant.  Besides, the engines presented in the course are based on the Intel oneAPI Rendering Toolkit, which best synergise with LRZ's CPU-based machines, reaching near machine-optimal efficiency.
The course will tutor the attendants in the full workflow, from data reading to image and movie production. Hands-on sessions will be privileged over theory.
A few elements of scivis and general best-practices for usage of LRZ supercomputers will be covered, albeit the main focus remains on the applications.

Topics covered include:

• Introduction to LRZ scivis offering
• VisIt
  • Setup and launch of a remote engine with slurm
  • Tips for data exploration (plots, settings, operators, expressions)
  • Interactive surface and volume plots with OSPRay as rendering engine
  • Automated batch movie rendering  
•  OSPRay Studio
  • Launch OSPRay Studio in interactive mode through our old RVS
  • GUI Data exploration: engines, auto-denoise, visual parameters
  • CLI interface of Studio, simple scripting and job submission
• Special session (experimental): bring your own data! (for either application; simpler for VisIt)
  • Simple, common strategies to read your data (no guarantees for any specific format)
  • Semi-supervised hands-on (optional)

Prerequisites

• The general usage model of LRZ supercomputers: basic usage of terminal, ssh, job submission via Slurm, RVS via VNC client. These can be obtained by e.g. attending the introductory course "Introduction to LRZ HPC Systems with Focus on CFD Workflows".
• Basic familiarity with the main concepts of scientific data visualisation and manipulation (algebra, simple differential operations, volume renderings, raytracing).

Attendants will be guided in performing these operations, as the applications automate many of these tasks; for the rest structured examples will be provided. They should however be familiar with the concepts.

Hands-On

The course revolves mainly around the hands-on sessions, as the point is to enable the users to operate the provided applications.
The sessions will be done on the CooLMUC2 Cluster @ LRZ with 28-way Haswell-based nodes and FDR14 Infiniband interconnect.

Please bring your own laptop with X11 support and an ssh client installed for the hands-on sessions. There are no PCs installed in the course room!

• Under Windows

  • We recommend to install the comfortable tool MobaXterm (https://mobaxterm.mobatek.net/download-home-edition.html) which also includes an X11 client.
  • Alternatively install and run the Xming X11 Server for Windows: https://sourceforge.net/projects/xming/ and then install and run the terminal software putty: https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/latest.html 
• Under macOS
  • Install X11 support for macOS XQuartz:  https://www.xquartz.org/
• Under Linux
  • ssh and X11 support comes with all distributions

Besides that, you will need:

• VisIt version 3.1.X or 3.2.X installed on your laptop (3.3.X is NOT supported yet). It will act as a client. You may get the free binary from https://visit-dav.github.io/visit-website/releases-as-tables/#latest.
• A VNC client or similar means to access LRZ Remote Visualisation Service. Instruction can be found under https://doku.lrz.de/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=53379796.
• You are encouraged to bring data from your own research and projects, although we cannot guarantee compatibility for any specific format.
  If you cannot, alternative datasets will be provided.

Content Level

The content level of the course is broken down as:

Language

English

Lecturers

Dr. Salvatore Cielo (LRZ)

Prices and Eligibility

The course is open and free of charge for people from academia and industry.

Registration

Please register with your official e-mail address to prove your affiliation.

Withdrawal Policy

See Withdrawal

Legal Notices

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See Legal Notices