Displaying CAE/Viewer on another PC

[mrgoldthorpe]

This is perhaps an X-windows question, but it relates to re-directing the display so that an ABAQUS CAE/Viewer session can be conducted on a PC remote from the one that hosts ABAQUS.

I frequently run ABAQUS/CAE sessions on my desktop PC, where ABAQUS is hosted on a remote Unix or Linux workstation. I run 'Cygwin/X' (free!) on my desktop and use 'ssh -X...' to login to the remote workstation. I run ABAQUS CAE and soon the CAE window appears on my desktop. It can be slow; but it's preferable to travelling to the site when only a quick check is needed.

Does anyone know if it possible to do a similar thing (and how is it best done) where ABAQUS is hosted on a remote computer running Windows XP (Pro)?

Thanks in anticipation.

MRG

 

[johnhors]

Martin,

Have you looked into using pcAnywhere from symantec for this?

 

[andreamordini]

I have done it with remote desktop.

andrea

-------------------------------------------
Andrea Mordini, Civil Engineer, Ph.D.

http://www.andreamordini.com

-------------------------------------------

 

[mrgoldthorpe]

johnhors,

That was a quick response! Thanks.

In answer to your question, "yes". I have Laplink Gold and can use 'Laplink Internet' to control the ABAQUS hosting PC from my own desktop. Indeed, this is the way we would run and monitor jobs and transfer files. We haven't tried to run CAE in this way yet, since we haven't yet obtained the ABAQUS hosting PC.

However, I was wondering whether a proper exporting of the display, if it could be done, would be faster than Laplink Internet. So I'd still welcome any suggestions regarding this route, if it's possible.

 

[johnhors]

Martin

I'm no expert, but I've done similar things in the past, using Xwin32 to display and run the unix only Catia V4 on a PC and also when Catia was exclusively IBM hardware based to use the unix command to export the display to a HP Xterminal. However I'm 99% sure that there is no equivalent in DOS/windows to the unix export display command, thus you have to use a third party program to achieve this.

 

[xerf]

I use Remote Desktop Connection for this, too.
If the net connection is good enough is like working directly on your computer.

 

[mrgoldthorpe]

Thanks for the replies on this. I think I'll go along with Laplink Internet as the easiest solution.
MRG

 

[mrgoldthorpe]

Hi again. We are trying out ULTRAVNC, suggested by a colleague. It works well with regard to a connection. However, when running Viewer the model itself isn't displayed remotely (it does on the server PC being controlled). Perhaps it's because of the way Viewer addresses the graphics card on the Server PC (Win XP with NVIDIA GEForce 6800 card).

Any suggestions welcome, though I'm looking on the web at the moment.

 

[mrgoldthorpe]

... back again.
Hardware acceleration has been disabled on the video card of the server and now the model can be seen (by me) remotely via ADSL. The server response doesn't seem degraded according to my colleague sitting in front of it. Presumably hardware acceleration is only apparent when you are doing gaming/animation.

The speed of Ultravnc is impressive, though I've never tried Remote Desktop. For the record see:

http://www.ultravnc.com/

Regards (and thanks for your initial response)
MRG

 

[brep]

Just a note on the previous posting by mrgoldthorpe: Hardware acceleration *certainly does* help speed things up - you just have to try manipulating (rotating, etc) a large model with thousands of geometric faces (millions of elements) to see this. ABAQUS/CAE (and other 3D CAD systems) stress the opengl renderer as much as any application around. Games use a lot of tricks (e.g. a tree may be only be a single facet with a texture mapped to it) to only render a relatively small number of triangles (facets) but they do it at high refresh rates. CAD/CAE vendors must produce *much* higher quality images (often rendering a hundreds or thousands of facets in a scene at any one time. 10 frames per second is all that is possible for most video cards with this number of facets...)

PS: Your mileage may vary!