FDS and smokeview with remote desktop over slow connection.

[Robin]

Hi, just wondering if anyone has experience with the following.

I am considering working remotely via laptop, far from the office (when Corona is over), in India say, but my simulation machines are in Germany.  I don't see a problem with editing the FDS files with the laptop, sending them to the machines and monitoring them. But I do think I will have big problems opening the Smokeview files over a slow and laggy connection with RDP. Can anyone confirm this? any tips? 

I assume what I will probably have to do is just download the relevant files (smv, bnd, sf, s3d, iso)  to my laptop, then view them locally. But heavily limit the file size through very long update times, otherwise I will spend all day waiting for 2Gb of iso files to download. It seems like the biggest files are .iso, then .s3d, then bd/sf, for my simulations anyway.

I expect that the internet abroad is OK but just that the ping is too high because of the distance.  

Anyway, if anyone has tips/experience, that would be very welcome. Thanks.

[Salah Benkorichi]

There aren't many tricks as far as I know. 

You would ideally need to have a separate machine sitting next to the machines you use, and you can just remotely access so would allow you to have a quick loading process etc. Otherwise, if the machines that do the calculations have a decent graphics and accessible, then you can just log on into them directly and access the files quicker. Other than that, if you try to use just internet access, it will take a whole to load, or you need to download the outputs as you've said but that will not be efficient if you're doing it daily.

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[dr_jfloyd]

RDP might be an option. Given the distance you will have some latency in rotating the geometry or opening menus in Smokeview. This may be a bit frustrating, but I imagine you will adjust to it after a little practice. If bandwidth winds up being an issue, you could always try setting the remote desktop to a slightly lower resolution. 

For downloading files, you don't need to download everything for Smokeview to run. When Smokeview launches if it discovers that output files listed in the smv file aren't present, it just doesn't give you a menu option to load them. This even applies to mutli-mesh slices. If you just download some of the meshes for a slice file, Smokeview will just load those that are present.

[Glenn Forney]

Are your remote machines macs or linux boxe

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[Kevin McGrattan]

We are all working at home and accessing our linux cluster at NIST using Nomachine. Essentially, we open up a remote desktop, and run Smokeview using the native linux build. Only the images and animations are transmitted back to us at home. It works well.

[Robin Amy]

All my machines are Windows. At the moment I am also only doing home office with VPN/RDP but only a few km's from the office, Smokeview is usable but a bit jumpy. But I am expecting with the much longer ping everything will be frustrating/unusable over RDP.

I use Pyrosim, and that just about works right now, but I have to disconnect/reconnect every 30 minutes as the RDP freezes, so I reckon that will almost certainly be unusable with a >130 ms Ping, but I will either get another license for the laptop or do everything without Pyrosim. However I suspect that the ping is not the only problem there, but client/host getting out of sync,missing packets, poor performance of my computer at home or something like that, I suppose I should sort this out here first before abroad.

FYI: I have already had a bit of an attempt at diagnosing RDP performance on windows, in case anyone else has problems then the following links are a good starting point... turns out that the last time I had problems it was my laptop at home was sometimes too slow to decompress the incoming data, tripping everything up.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-desktop/remotefx-graphics-performance-counters

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-server/remote/remote-desktop-services/rds-rdsh-performance-counters

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Dr. Robin Amy

On Mon, 1 Feb 2021 at 15:31, Kevin McGrattan <mcgr...@gmail.com> wrote:

We are all working at home and accessing our linux cluster at NIST using Nomachine. Essentially, we open up a remote desktop, and run Smokeview using the native linux build. Only the images and animations are transmitted back to us at home. It works well.

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[fde]

Rob, could you please describe the `jumpy` behaviour in SMV? I have had a problem with SMV over remote desktop and SMV windows were significantly slow. That was only the case in the menu windows, not the visual one. For information, I could not find a solution for that. 

[Rob]

Hi, I found that zooming/rotating/panning was jumpy/not smooth, i.e. I would try to do one of these actions, and then the image would freeze a few seconds, then when it eventually refreshed the model would be not where I wanted.

I have been trying with "chrome remote desktop" and I can already see that Pyrosim is WAY smoother than with windows RDP, so maybe try that. In terms of security it seems better too: I don't have to have a constantly open VPN connection between my computer and the office (along with everyone else doing home office), plus I have effectively 3-factor authentification. Looking at Nomachine  too as recomended above, also seems professional and free.