Installing IMAS-ParaView

If the IMAS-ParaView module is available on your HPC environment, you can ignore the further steps below and simply load the module as follows:

module load IMAS-ParaView
# Run paraview (add vglrun to enable hardware acceleration)
vglrun paraview
# Open the "Sources" tab in the top left, and ensure you see "IMAS Tools" in
# the drop down menu.
# The command-line interface can be started using:
imas-paraview --help

Installation on Ubuntu 24.04

Caution

The paraview package in the Ubuntu 24.04 apt repository has compatibility issues with Python 3.12 (which is the Python version distributed with Ubuntu 24.04).

Instead, we will download and use the program from the ParaView website.

  1. Download ParaView 5.13.3 from the Paraview website: https://www.paraview.org/download/?version=v5.13&filter=Linux

  2. Unzip the paraview package:

    tar -xzvf ParaView-5.13.3-MPI-Linux-Python3.10-x86_64.tar.gz

  3. Install uv:

    python -m venv uvvenv
. uvvenv/bin/activate
pip install uv

  4. Use uv to create a virtual environment with Python 3.10 (which is the version used by ParaView) and install the required packages.

    Note: you will need the imas_core package to load IMAS data that is stored in the HDF5 or MDSplus backends. Unfortunately, this component is not publicly available, but can be installed provided you have access to its git repository. See https://sharepoint.iter.org/departments/POP/CM/IMDesign/Code%20Documentation/ACCESS-LAYER-doc/python/dev/building_installing.html#prerequisites (behind login wall) for the prerequisites.

    uv venv --python 3.10
uv pip install --python 3.10 imas-paraview
# Uninstall VTK, this would conflict with ParaView's built-in VTK module
uv pip uninstall --python 3.10 vtk
# Optional: install imas-core package from the ITER git:
git clone ssh://git@git.iter.org/imas/al-core.git -b main
uv pip install --python 3.10 ./al-core

  5. Set required environment variables and run ParaView:

    export PYTHONPATH="$PWD/.venv/lib/python3.10/site-packages/"
export PV_PLUGIN_PATH="$PWD/.venv/lib/python3.10/site-packages/imas_paraview/plugins"
# This LD_PRELOAD is required when loading data with the imas_core HDF5 backend.
# Note that it may break any built-in ParaView HDF5 support...
export LD_PRELOAD="/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libhdf5_serial.so.103"
./ParaView-5.13.3-MPI-Linux-Python3.10-x86_64/bin/paraview

Installation on Ubuntu 22.04

  1. Download ParaView 5.13.3 from the Paraview website: https://www.paraview.org/download/?version=v5.13&filter=Linux

  2. Unzip the paraview package:

    tar -xzvf ParaView-5.13.3-MPI-Linux-Python3.10-x86_64.tar.gz

  3. Create a virtual environment and the install the required packages.

    Note: you will need the imas_core package to load IMAS data that is stored in the HDF5 or MDSplus backends. Unfortunately, this component is not publicly available, but can be installed provided you have access to its git repository. See https://sharepoint.iter.org/departments/POP/CM/IMDesign/Code%20Documentation/ACCESS-LAYER-doc/python/dev/building_installing.html#prerequisites (behind login wall) for the prerequisites.

    python -m venv venv
. venv/bin/activate
pip install imas-paraview
# Uninstall VTK, this would conflict with ParaView's built-in VTK module
pip uninstall vtk
# Optional: install imas-core package from the ITER git:
git clone ssh://git@git.iter.org/imas/al-core.git -b main
pip install ./al-core

  4. Set required environment variables and run ParaView:

    export PYTHONPATH="$PWD/venv/lib/python3.10/site-packages/"
export PV_PLUGIN_PATH="$PWD/venv/lib/python3.10/site-packages/imas_paraview/plugins"
# This LD_PRELOAD is required when loading data with the imas_core HDF5 backend.
# Note that it may break any built-in ParaView HDF5 support...
export LD_PRELOAD="/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libhdf5_serial.so.103"
./ParaView-5.13.3-MPI-Linux-Python3.10-x86_64/bin/paraview

Development installation on SDCC

This section provides instructions for installing and using a development version of the IMAS-Paraview plugins on the ITER SDCC cluster.

  • Setup a project folder and clone git repository

mkdir projects
cd projects
git clone git@github.com:iterorganization/IMAS-ParaView.git
cd IMAS-ParaView

  • To run a plugin in Paraview, run the following at the root of the project directory.

# Load compatible IMAS-Python, IMAS-Core and ParaView modules, like:
module load IMAS-AL-Core/5.4.3-foss-2023b IMAS-Python/2.0.0-foss-2023b \
  ParaView/5.12.0-foss-2023b
# export environment variables, this assumes the current
# working directory is the root of the repository
export PV_PLUGIN_PATH=$PWD/imas_paraview/plugins:$PV_PLUGIN_PATH
export PYTHONPATH=$PWD:$PYTHONPATH
# Run paraview (add vglrun to enable hardware acceleration)
vglrun paraview
# Open the "Sources" tab in the top left, if you see "IMAS Tools"
# in the drop down, it is installed correctly.

  • To use the command-line interface, setup a python virtual environment and install python dependencies

# Load compatible IMAS-Python, IMAS-Core and ParaView modules, like:
module load IMAS-AL-Core/5.4.3-foss-2023b IMAS-Python/2.0.0-foss-2023b \
  ParaView/5.12.0-foss-2023b
# create virtual environment and install dependencies
python3 -m venv ./venv
. venv/bin/activate
pip install --upgrade pip
pip install --upgrade wheel setuptools
# For development install in editable mode
pip install -e .[all]
# Run CLI with help information
imas-paraview --help
# If you see the help page of IMAS-ParaView, it is installed correctly.

  • Every time that a new session is started, ensure the correct modules are loaded, the python virtual environment is activated, and the environment variables are set.

# Load the required modules
module load IMAS-AL-Core/5.4.3-foss-2023b IMAS-Python/2.0.0-foss-2023b \
  ParaView/5.12.0-foss-2023b
# Export the environment variables
export PV_PLUGIN_PATH=$PWD/imas_paraview/plugins:$PV_PLUGIN_PATH
export PYTHONPATH=$PWD:$PYTHONPATH
# And activate the Python virtual environment
. venv/bin/activate
# Validate if it is working as intended
imas-paraview --version

  • To run the unit and integration tests, make sure the install is working using the code block above. Also ensure the optional test dependencies are pip installed (or simply use all, to install all optional dependencies).

# The integration tests require X virtual framebuffer to be installed
module load Xvfb/21.1.9-GCCcore-13.2.0

# The tests require downloading external IDSs from Zenodo
wget -P data/ -i zenodo_datasets.txt

# Run the tests
python -m pytest

  • Alternatively, if you want to skip running the integration tests and the tests that contain external data:

python -m pytest -m "not integration and not external_data"

  • To build the IMAS-ParaView documentation, ensure the optional docs dependencies are pip installed (or simply use all, to install all optional dependencies).

make -C docs html
# You can now open ./docs/_build/html/index.html
Last update: 2026-03-11