The QuickView tool family at NERSC ¶

Our tools have been installed at NERSC, the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center and are continually updated there. The following sections on this page contain instructions for users who would like to use our installations.

User's who would like to understand how our installation was done or how to have their own installation are referred to this page.

Quickstart for users familiar with JupyterHub ¶

Login to JupytherHub and start a terminal window.
Optional but recommended: in the terminal, use the cd command to go to the directory where your data files are located (or a directory closer to the data files than your home directory).
QuickView version 2 can be launched using the following command:

/global/common/software/m4359/quickview2

QuickCompare can be launched using the following command:

/global/common/software/m4359/quickcompare

After a few seconds, the Terminal window will say "Use URL below to connect to the application:" and shows a URL starting with https://. A click on the URL will bring up the graphical UI in a brower window.

Tip 1: Choosing a server for your analysis session.

JupyterHub's control panel allows users to choose from serveral different types of resources for their computing and analyais needs, including, e.g., login node, shared GPU node, exclusive nodes, as explained in NERSC's documentation.

Since login nodes are shared by users and hence can get very busy or run into memory constraints, and since our tools can make use of GPUs for interactive rendering, we recommend that users choose a shared GPU node.

Keep in mind, though, that time spent on shared GPU nodes or exclusive nodes will be charged to your project's allocation.

Tip 2: Same executable for all kinds of nodes.

Regardless of which type of node is chosen, the same commands (as listed above) are used to launch our tools in the QuickView family.

Tip 3: No need to manually load conda.

When one of the commands provided above is used to launch tools in the QuickView family, there is no need to manually load conda or the conda environment that our tools are installed in. This is because the above-mentioned commands are in fact scripts that have included those steps.

Reminder: Shut down the server when you are done.

After finishing your analysis, please remember to shut down the connection to your selected server (node) to stop the charging of hours to your project's allocation. This is explained at the end of this video, and below is a recap of the steps (clicks):

go to the JupytherHub window/tab in your browser,
click File in the top-left corner,
scroll down and choose Hub Control Panel,
in the Control Panel brought up in a new browser tab/window, click on the red "stop" button for the server to be shut down. An example is shown in the screenshot below.

For NERSC user's who have not used JupyterHub ¶

Please see this section of NERSC's documentation, especially the video "How to log in to Perlmutter with Jupyter", to learn how to use the service.

If you do not yet have any user account at NERSC ¶

Information on this page can help get you started.