Making ParaView Easier for the Customer: A Guide to Implementers

ParaView has become a very useful tool in the Department of Defense high performance computing (HPC) community. As data sizes increase, access to the HPC resources to drive ParaView and other visualization packages (including EnSight and VisIt) is essential to many HPC customers. Unfortunately, these packages are not aware of the configurations required, or the security policies enacted, for each computing resource that a user may want to access. Individual customization is usually required, which can be a frustrating and time- consuming process. This paper documents our experiences with ParaView connection definition (.pvsc) files as implemented within the Computational Sciences Environment (CSE). ParaView connection definition files provide a method for automatically performing any number of complex operations required to connect to an HPC resource and start the processes required to interactively interrogate an HPC-sized dataset. The ultimate goal is to provide a mechanism that allows users to more easily utilize the computational resources available to them.