The concept is that a EnShell process runs on each computer that is intended to run an EnSight application component. If multiple computers will be used, then each runs one or more EnShells and the collection is called a EnShell network. Through command line options, the EnShells are instructed on how to communicate with each other. For example, if a user intends to run the EnSight Client on her workstation named bohr, the EnSight SOS on a "login node" named kepler, and EnSight Servers on cluster nodes n1-n8, she would run 10 instances of enshell on each of the computers bohr, kepler, and n1 through n8. Once the EnShell network is running, she starts EnSight by running ensight -sos -enshell on bohr. The EnSight Client communicates with the local EnShell process to launch the SOS and EnSight Servers on the appropriate computers.

To streamline start up of the EnShell network as well as to launch EnSight, users typically run the GUI based application ceistart, referred to as CEIStart for the remainder of this document. Using CEIStart a user can choose from one or more site-configured EnShell networks, each of which has its own set of site-determined options (as shown below). The site can make each configuration as flexible or concise as is appropriate for their computational environment.

CEIStart No GUI

You can run ceistart in batch, with no graphical user interface, from the command line. To use this feature you must supply the values that are given in the graphical user interface on the command line. This is done using the following syntax:

-dict <keyword> <value> -dict <keyword2> <value2> <moreoptions>

each of the keywords is found in the site_server_configs.py file found in your site_preferences folder in your EnSight install. For example a Remote SOS configuration in your python might have a graphical user interface that has a number of entries for you to fill in using the following keywords:

configName - This is the name of the configuration, and is mandatory.

remotehost - The name of the remote host where the SOS and servers will run

nprocs - The number of servers that you wish to run in SOS and your command to run EnSight with 4 servers on the host named 'steve' in batch (no gui for ceistart nor EnSight, with a graphics screen size of 1024 x 768 and with python arguments passed into your python file would be as follows:

ceistart -dict configName 'Remote SOS' -dict remotehost steve -dict nprocs 4 -X -batch 1024 768 -no_prefs -p automated_test.py -pyargv fmt Fluent beg 1 end 5 -endpyargv -v 2