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pages/merlin6/05-Software-Support/paraview.md

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+---
+title: Running Paraview
+#tags:
+last_updated: 03 December 2020
+keywords: software, paraview, mesa, OpenGL
+summary: "This document describes how to run ParaView in the Merlin6 cluster"
+sidebar: merlin6_sidebar
+permalink: /merlin6/paraview.html
+---
+
+## Requirements
+
+**[NoMachine](/merlin6/nomachine.html)** is the official **strongly recommended and supported** tool for running *ParaView*.
+Consider that running over SSH (X11-Forwarding needed) is very slow, but also configuration might not work as it also depends
+on the client configuration (Linux workstation/laptop, Windows with XMing, etc.). Hence, please **avoid running Paraview over SSH**.
+The only exception for running over SSH is when running it as a job from a NoMachine client.
+
+## ParaView
+
+### PModules
+
+Is strongly recommended the use of the latest ParaView version available in PModules. In example, for loading **paraview**:
+
+```bash
+module use unstable
+module load paraview/5.8.1
+```
+
+### Running ParaView
+
+For running ParaView, one can run it with **VirtualGL** to take advantatge of the GPU card located on each login node. For that, once loaded, you can start **paraview** as follows:
+
+```bash
+vglrun paraview
+```
+
+Alternatively, one can run **paraview** with *mesa* support with the below command. This can be useful when running on CPU computing nodes (with `srun` / `salloc`) 
+which have no graphics card (and where `vglrun` is not possible):
+
+```bash
+paraview-mesa paraview
+```
+
+#### Running older versions of ParaView
+
+Older versions of ParaView available in PModules (i.e. *paraview/5.0.1* and *paraview/5.4.1*) might require a different command
+for running paraview with **Mesa** support. The command is the following:
+
+```bash
+# Warning: only for Paraview 5.4.1 and older
+paraview --mesa
+```
+
+#### Running ParaView interactively in the batch system
+
+One can run ParaView interactively in the CPU cluster as follows:
+
+```bash
+# First, load module. In example: "module load paraview/5.8.1"
+srun --pty --x11 --partition=general --ntasks=1 paraview-mesa paraview
+```
+
+One can change the partition, number of tasks or specify extra parameters to `srun` if needed.