13. Client Server

Scientific simulations are almost always run on a powerful supercomputer and accessed using desktop workstations. This means that the databases usually reside on remote computers. In the past, the practice was to copy the databases to a visualization server, a powerful computer with very fast computer graphics hardware. With ever increasing database sizes, it no longer makes sense to copy databases from the computer on which they were generated. Instead, it makes more sense to examine the data on the powerful supercomputer and use local graphics hardware to draw the visualization. VisIt can run in a client-server mode that allows this exact use case. The GUI and viewer run locally (client) while the database server and parallel compute engine run on the remote supercomputer (server). Running VisIt in client-server mode is almost as easy as running all components locally. This chapter explains the differences between running locally and remotely and describes how to run VisIt in client-server mode.