(Interactive) visualization on SURFsara infrastructure

For interactive visualization of (large) 3D datasets it is possible to use "remote visualization" on a number of infrastructures. With remote visualization the user runs his/her visualization application on a SURFsara infrastructure instead of on their local desktop machine. This has a number of advantages:

• The data to be visualized can be read directly from the storage at SURFsara, without having to be transferred to the user's local machine. Only a desktop image is transfered to the user, using a (VNC) remote desktop.
• Multiple nodes can be used in parallel to provide increased visualization capabilities, in terms of GPU power and available memory. Note that this mode of usage requires the visualization application to support this kind of parallel rendering.
• A stack of visualization software is maintained by SURFsara, freeing you, the user, from having to spend time on this issue. In principal, user-written applications based on OpenGL are also supported.

The user controls the visualization through a VNC remote desktop. All computations and visualization processing are performed on the infrastructure, with no need to transfer the datasets being visualization to your local system.

Remote visualization is aimed at interactive visualization of 3D datasets. Of course, there are many more visualization possibilities that are of interest, such as of 2D geographic data, visualizations of very large networks or interactive visualization in a Jupyter notebook. For more information about the possibilities please contact visualization@surfsara.nl.

Cartesius

The Cartesius system contains a set of nodes with GPUs that are usable for interactive remote visualization. This requires access to the GPU nodes, which is granted separatedly, either as part of the NWO proposal or separately for visualization purposes.

See here for more information. We provide a set of command-line scripts and documentation to make using remote visualization easy and more user-friendly.

HPC Cloud

The HPC Cloud contains a number of nodes with GPUs, which can be used within a VM for GPU-based computation and visualization. See here for more information on attaching a GPU to a VM and here for more information on using that GPU in the VM for visualization purposes.

Lisa

The GPU-nodes in Lisa are technically capable of performing visualization, but are currently not specifically targeted at visualization usage. This might change in future. In case you are interested in using the Lisa GPU-nodes for visualization please contact helpdesk@surfsara.nl.

Non-GPU nodes

Strictly speaking GPUs are not required to perform visualization. But for interactive visualization of large datasets a GPU will provide much more performance than CPU-based visualization.

But in case you are interested in CPU-based visualization, for example to use more nodes than there are GPU-nodes available, please contact us at visualization@surfsara.nl