[IPython-dev] visualization with parallel ipython

[Doug Jones]

Hello IPython devs,

I've recently been looking at visualization of parallel data sets and
have started to consider the possibilities for this type of
visualization when the data is distributed within IPython1.

What I'm wondering is, if a user would like to visualize on their
desktop or laptop and the data has been spread over many nodes using
IPython1, how easy or difficult would it be to visualize this data
using tools with Python interfaces.

I suppose my main concern is moving the data from nodes to the user's
machine. I know before I was told that IPython1 had issues when trying
to move data that was on the order of 100MB. Is this still an issue?

Are there any users of IPython that currently do visualization of
parallel data sets? If so, do you know what tools they find useful?

It seems that in serial environments pylab and mayavi are popular
choices, so it might be likely that users want to use these packages
in a parallel environment.

Forgive my ignorance, but I am not really familiar with pylab or
mayavi, but I'm hoping a flow similar to this would be feasible for
these packages.

One IPython1 node collects the data necessary for the plot.
This node uses a visualization package to produce the plot or
visualization (a graph or geometry).
This resulting visualization is serialized and sent to the client.
The client can then view and further manipulate using a plotting tool
on their desktop machine.

On a side note, there was the announcement that IPython1 "saw" was now
in the alpha stage. How far away is this from being considered
"stable". I'm not really looking to use this in a production
environment or anything like that. Instead I'm hoping to deploy it
locally for my own development uses and also the use of a few
testers/users of the system.

Thank you,
~Doug