VisIt

VisIt is an Open Source, interactive, scalable, visualization, animation and analysis tool from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories.

Official homepage

Please contact NSC Support if you have any questions or problems.

Installations on NSC systems

Tetralith and Sigma

VisIt is available via the module system on Tetralith and Sigma. For more information about available versions, please see the Tetralith and Sigma Software list.

How to run

Load the VisIt module module corresponding to the version you want to use, e.g.,

    module load visit/3.2.1-nsc1-bdist

To launch the graphical interface (GUI), use the following command

    vglrun visit -launchengine -hw-accel

The installed version of VisIt requires a graphics card (GPU). Without hardware acceleration (option -hw-accel), you may not be able to see any graphical output.

That means, you can use VisIt on the login nodes, that have a GPU, or you have to use a compute node that has a GPU. A GPU node can be accessed as following:

    interactive --virtualgl -n 1 -c 32 --gpus-per-task=1

Important: Visualization on Login Nodes

You should not process very large data sets on the login nodes, as this may impact other users negatively.

Parallel Rendering using Multiple Nodes

Currently, VisIt is configured to use one node, but not multiple nodes. The use of multiple nodes for parallel rendering requires an additional setup.