You can get help on starting VisIt_ with the commands
visit -help visit -fullhelp
For convenience, the output from visit -fullhelp
is shown below.
USAGE: visit [options]:
Interface options --------------------------------------------------------------------------- -gui Run with the Graphical User Interface (default). -cli Run with the Command Line Interface. Movie making options --------------------------------------------------------------------------- -movie Run the CLI in a movie making mode. Must be combined with -sessionfile. Will produce a simple movie by drawing all the plots in the specified session for every timestep of the database. Startup options --------------------------------------------------------------------------- -o <filename> Open the specified data file at startup. -s <filename> Run the specified VisIt script. -sessionfile <filename> Open the specified session file at startup Note that this argument only takes effect with -gui or -movie. -config <filename> Initialize the viewer at startup using the named config file. If an absolute path is not given, the file is assumed to be in the .visit directory. -noconfig Don't process configuration files at startup. -launchengine <host> Launch an engine at startup. The <host> parameter is optional. If it is not specified, the engine will be launched on the local host. If you wish to launch an engine on a remote host, specify the host's name as the <host> parameter. -nosplash Do not display the splash screen at startup. Window options --------------------------------------------------------------------------- -small Use a smaller desktop area/window size. -geometry <spec> What portion of the screen to use. This is a standard X Windows geometry specification. This option can be used to set the size of images generated from scripts and movies. -viewer_geometry <spec> What portion of the screen the viewer windows will use. This is a standard X Windows geometry specification. This option overrides the -geometry option that the GUI passes to the viewer. -window_anchor <x,y> The x,y position on the screen where VisIt's GUI will show its windows (Main window excluded). -style <style> One of: windows,cde,motif,sgi. -locale <locale> The locale that you want VisIt to use when displaying translated menus and controls. VisIt will use the default locale if the -locale option is not provided. -background <color> Background color for GUI. -foreground <color> Foreground color for GUI. -nowin Run with viewer windows off-screen (i.e. OSMesa). This is typically used with the -cli option. -stereo Enable active stereo, also known as the page-flipping, or 'CrystalEyes' mode. -nowindowmetrics Prevents X11 from grabbing and moving a test widget used in calculating window borders. This option can be useful if VisIt hangs when displaying to an Apple X-server. Version options --------------------------------------------------------------------------- -version Do NOT run VisIt. Just print the current version. -git_version Do NOT run VisIt. Just print the Git version it was built from. -beta Run the current beta version. -v <version> Run a specified version. Specifying 2 digits, such as X.Y, will run the latest patch release for that version. Specifying 3 digits, such as X.Y.Z, will run that specific version. Other resources for help --------------------------------------------------------------------------- run-time: While running VisIt, look under the "Help" menu. on-line: https://visit-help.llnl.gov *************************************************************************** ADDITIONAL OPTIONS *************************************************************************** Parallel launch options --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Notes: All of these options are ordinarily obtained from host profiles. However, the command line options override anything in the profiles. When parallel arguments are added but the engine is not the component being launched, -launchengine is implied. Explicitly add -launchengine to launch a remote parallel engine. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- -setupenv Use the VisIt script to set up the environment for the engine on the compute nodes. -par Run the parallel version. This option is implied by any of the other parallel options listed below. -l <method> Launch in parallel using the given method. -pl <method> Launch only the engine in parallel as specified. -la <args> Additional arguments for the parallel launcher. -sla <args> Additional arguments for the parallel sub-launcher. -np <# procs> The number of processors to use. -nn <# nodes> The number of nodes to allocate. -p <part> Partition to run in. -n <name> The parallel job name. -b <bank> Bank from which to draw resources. -t <time> Maximum job run time. -machinefile <file> Machine file. -expedite Makes DPCS give priority scheduling. -icet In scalable rendering mode, use the IceT parallel image compositor (default). -no-icet Do not use the IceT parallel compositor. Hardware accelerated parallel (scalable) rendering options --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Notes: These options should only be used with parallel clusters that have graphics cards. If you are using a serial version of VisIt, you are already getting hardware acceleration and these options are not needed. Furthermore, you must be in scalable rendering mode for VisIt to utilize a cluster's GPUs. By default, VisIt is configured to switch into scalable rendering mode when rendering complexity exceeds a predefined limit. VisIt can manage the creation and tear down of X servers for you. It will do this automatically if you specify the -launch-x parameter, but you can customize the process with the -x-args and -display parameters, which respect %l and %n format specifiers. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- -hw-accel Tells VisIt that it should use graphics cards. -n-gpus-per-node <int> Number of GPUs per node of the cluster (1). -launch-x Tell VisIt to manage the X servers -no-launch-x Let the cluster manager X servers [default] -display Tells VisIt which display to use. -x-args '<string>' Extra arguments to X server. Load balance options --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Note: Each time VisIt executes a pipeline the relevant domains for the execution are assigned to processors. This list of domains is sorted in increasing global domain number. The options below effect how domains in this list are assigned to processors. Assuming there are D domains and P processors... --------------------------------------------------------------------------- -lb-block Assign the first D/P domains to processor 0, the next D/P domains to processor 1, etc. -lb-stride Assign every Pth domain starting from the first to processor 0, every Pth domain starting from the second to processor 1, etc. -lb-absolute Assign domains by absolute domain number % P. This guarantees a given domain is always processed by the same processor but can also lead to poor balance when only a subset of domains is selected. -lb-random Randomly assign domains to processors. -allowdynamic Dedicate one processor to spreading the work dynamically among the other processors. This mode has limitations in the types of queries it can perform. Under development. -lb-stream Similar to -lb-block, but have the domains travel down the pipeline one at a time, instead of all together. Under development. Database differencing options --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Use the '-diff <ldb> <rdb>' option to run VisIt in a database differencing mode. VisIt will generate expressions to facilitate visualization and analysis of the difference between the left-database, <ldb>, and right-database, <rdb>. VisIt will open windows to display both the left and right databases as well as their difference. VisIt uses the Cross-Mesh Field Evaluation (CMFE) expression functions to help generate these differences. A CMFE function creates an instance of a variable from another (source) mesh on the specified (destination) mesh. VisIt can use two variants of CMFE expression functions depending on how similar the source and destination meshes are; connectivity-based (conn_cmfe) which assumes the underlying mesh(s) for the left and right databases have identical connectivity and position-based (pos_cmfe) which does not make this assumption. VisIt will attempt to automatically select which variant of CMFE expression to use based on some simple heuristics. For meshes with identical connectivity, conn_cmfe expressions are preferrable because they are higher performance and do not require VisIt to perform any interpolation. In fact, the conn_cmfe operation is perfectly anti-symmetric. That is <ldb> - <rdb> = -(<rdb> - <ldb>). The same cannot be said for pos_cmfe expressions. However, pos_cmfe expressions will attempt to generate useful results regardless of the similarity of the underlying meshes. Note that the differences VisIt will compute in this mode are single precision. This is true regardless of whether the input data is itself double precision. VisIt will convert double precision to single precision before processing it. Although this is a result of earlier visualization-specific design requirements and constraints, the intention is that eventually double precision will be supported. Finally, be sure to bring up Controls->Macros in the GUI to find a set of useful operations specifically tailored to database differencing. Also, typing 'help()' (including the '()') at the python prompt after starting 'visit -diff' will generate a more detailed help message. -diff <ldb> <rdb> Indicate you wish to run VisIt in database differencing mode and specify the two databases to difference. Note: All options occurring on the command-line *after* the '-diff' option are treated as options to the differencing script while all options occurring *before* the '-diff' option are treated as options to VisIt. -diffsum <ldb> <rdb> Run only the difference summary method of the 'visit -diff' script, in nowin mode so its fast, print the results, and immediately exit. -force_pos_cmfe Force use of position-based CMFE expressions. Advanced options --------------------------------------------------------------------------- -guesshost Try to guess the client host name from one of the SSH_CLIENT, SSH2_CLIENT, or SSH_CONNECTION environment variables. -noloopback Disable use of the 127.0.0.1 loopback device. -sshtunneling Tunnel all remote connections through ssh. NOTE: this overrides values set in the host profiles. -noint Disable interruption capability. -nopty Run without PTYs. -verbose Prints status information during pipeline execution. -dir <directory> Run a version of VisIt in the specified directory. The directory argument should specify the path to a VisIt installation directory. /bin is automatically appended to this path. -forceversion <ver> Force the given version. Overrides all intelligent version selection logic. -publicpluginsonly Disable all plugins but the default ones. -compiler <cc> Require version built with the specified compiler. -objectmode <mode> Require a specific object file mode. -forceinteractivecli Force the CLI to behave interactively, even if run with no terminal; similar to python's '-i' flag. -fullscreen Create the viewer window in full screen mode. May not be compatible with all window managers. -viewerdisplay <dpy> Have the viewer use a different display than the current value of DISPLAY. Can be useful for power wall displays with a separate console. -cycleregex <string> A regex-style regular expression to be used in extracting cycle numbers from file names. It is best to bracket this string in single quotes (') to avoid shell interpretation of special characters such as star (*). The format of the string begins with an opening '<' character, followed by the regular expression itself followed by a closing '>' character, optionally followed by a space ' ' character and sub-expression reference to indicate which part of the regular expression is the cycle number. Default behavior is as if -cycleregex '<([0-9]+)[^0-9]*\$> \\0' was specified meaning the last sequence of one or more digits before the end of the string found is used as the cycle number. Do a 'man 7 regex' to get more information on regular expression syntax. -ui-bcast-thresholds <int1> <int2> Two integers controlling behavior of parallel engine waiting in a broadcast for the next RPC from the viewer. VisIt used to rely solely upon MPI_Bcast for this. However, many implementations of MPI_Bcast use a polling loop that winds up keeping all processors busy and can make them unuseable by other processes. This is particularly bad for SMPs. So, VisIt implemented its own broadcast using MPI's send/receive methods. <int1> specifies the number of nanoseconds a processor sleeps while polling for completion of the broadcast. Specifying a value of zero (0) for <int1> results in falling back to older behavior using MPI's MPI_Bcast. <int1> effectively controls how 'busy' processors will be, polling for completion of the broadcast. <int2> specifies the number of seconds all processors should spin, polling as fast as possible, checking for completion of the broadcast BEFORE inserting sleeps into their polling loops. <int2> effectively controls how many seconds VisIt's server will be maximally responsive (although also keeping all processors occupied) before becoming more 'friendly' to other processes on the same node. The defaults are <int1> = 50000000 nanoseconds (1/20th of a sec) and <int2> = 5 seconds meaning VisIt will spin processors maximally for 5 seconds before inserting sleeps such that polling happens at the rate of 20 times per second. -idle-timeout <int> An integer representing the number of minutes an engine is allowed to idle (e.g. sit there doing no execution whatsoever, waiting for commands from the viewer). If this timeout is reached, the engine will terminate itself. The default is 480 minutes (8 hours). -exec-timeout <int> An integer representing the number of minutes an executing engine is allowed to remain in the execution of any single command from the viewer. If this timeout is reached, the engine will terminate itself. the default is 30 minutes. Beware that among other things, this timeout effects how long orphaned parallel processes will hang around, tying up parallel compute resources, following an exit-triggering error condition on any one process. Developer options (most for xml2... tools) --------------------------------------------------------------------------- -public xml2cmake: force install plugins publicly -private xml2cmake: force install plugins privately -clobber Permit xml2... tools to overwrite old files -noprint Silence debugging output from xml2... tools -outputtoinputdir Force xml2... tools to write output files to the directory containing the input XML file -arch print supported architecture(s) and exit Debugging options --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Note: Debugging options may degrade performance --------------------------------------------------------------------------- -debug <level> Run with <level> levels of output logging. <level> must be between 1 and 5. This will generate debug logs (called 'vlogs' for ALL components. Note that debug logs are unbuffered. However, if you also specify 'b' immediately after the digit indicating the debug level (e.g. '-debug 3b'), the logs will be buffered. This can substantially improve performance when a lot of debug output is generated. However, also beware that when debug logs are buffered, there isn't necessarily any guarantee they will contain the most recent debug output just prior to a crash. -debug_<compname> <level> Run specified component with <level> of output logging. For example, '-debug_mdserver 4' will run the mdserver with level 4 debugging. Multiple '-debug_<compname> <level>' args are allowed. -debug_engine_rank <r> Restrict debug output to the specified rank. -debug-processor-stride N Have only every Nth processor output debug logs. Prevents overwhelming parallel file systems. -clobber_vlogs By default, VisIt maintains debug logs from the 5 most recent invocations or restarts of each VisIt component. They are named something like A.mdserver.5.vlog, A.engine_ser.5.vlog, etc with the leading letter (A-E) indicating most to least recent. The clobber_vlogs flag causes VisIt to remove all debug logs and begin creating them anew. -vtk-debug Turn on debugging of VTK objects used in pipelines. -pid Append process ids to the names of log files. -timing Save timing data to files. -withhold-timing-output Withhold timing output during execution. Prevents output of timing information from affecting performance. -never-output-timings Never output timings files. This is used when you want the timer to be enabled (for usage by developers to measure inner loops), but you want to avoid blowing memory with the bookkeeping for each and every timing call. -timing-processor-stride N Have only every Nth processor output timing info. Prevents overwhelming parallel file systems. -env Print env. variables VisIt will use when run. -dump (dump_dir) Dump intermediate results from AVT filters, scalably rendered images, and html pages. Takes an optional argument that specifies the directory for -dump output files. -info-dump (dump_dir) Dump html pages only. Takes an optional argument that specifies the directory for -info-dump output files. -gdb <args> <comp> Run gdb with <args> on component <comp>. Default <args> is whitespace. -break <funcname> Add the specified breakpoint in gdb. -xterm With -gdb-something, run gdb in an xterm window. -newconsole Run any VisIt component in a new console window. -totalview <args> <comp> Run totalview with <args> on component <comp>. Default <args> is whitespace. -valgrind <args> <comp> Run valgrind with <args> on component <comp>. Default <args> is --tool=memcheck --error-limit=no --num-callers=50. -strace <args> <comp> Run strace with <args> on component <comp>. Default <args> is -ttt -T. In the above, all arguments between the tool name and the VisIt component name are treated as args to the tool. -apitrace <args> <comp> Run apitrace with <args> on component <comp>. Default <args> is trace --api gl. In the above, all arguments between the tool name and the VisIt component name are treated as args to the tool. -debug-malloc <args> <comp> Run the component with the libMallocDebug library on MacOS X systems. The libMallocDebug library lets the MallocDebug application attach to the instrumented application and retrieve memory allocation statistics. The -debug-malloc flag also sets up the environment for the leaks and heap tools. Printing heap allocations: % visit -debug-malloc gui & % Get the gui's <pid> % heap <pid> Printing memory leaks: % visit -debug-malloc gui & % Get the gui's <pid> % leaks <pid> Run with MallocDebug: Perl does not seem to be happy with libMallocDebug so you can run the GUI like this: % visit -cli >>> OpenGUI('-debug-malloc', 'MallocDebug', 'gui') Connect to the gui with MallocDebug and do your sampling. -nsys <args> <comp> Run Nsight Systems cli with <args> on component <comp>. Default <args> are: profile --stats=true --gpu-metrics-device=all -numrestarts <#> Number of attempts to restart a failed engine. -quiet Don't print the Running message. -protocol Print the definitions of the state objects that comprise the VisIt protocol so they can be compared against the values on other computers.
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