[IPython-dev] visualization with parallel ipython
Prabhu Ramachandran
prabhu at aero.iitb.ac.in
Tue May 8 13:33:01 EDT 2007
>>>>> "Doug" == Doug Jones <dfj225 at gmail.com> writes:
Doug> Are there any users of IPython that currently do
Doug> visualization of parallel data sets? If so, do you know what
Doug> tools they find useful?
I don't do any parallel visualization but do know that VTK does
support parallel processing via MPI. It is probably not very Pythonic
an approach though. Kitware also has a powerful open source tool
called ParaView that does parallel visualization. While paraview is
very powerful I am not sure that it is very Python friendly in the
sense that it integrates with numpy/ipython very well.
Doug> It seems that in serial environments pylab and mayavi are
Doug> popular choices, so it might be likely that users want to
Doug> use these packages in a parallel environment.
Doug> Forgive my ignorance, but I am not really familiar with
Doug> pylab or mayavi, but I'm hoping a flow similar to this would
Doug> be feasible for these packages.
I think this might be feasible but it is a good idea to look at what
VTK/ParaView do and learn from that before doing any work in this
direction. If you have mayavi related questions in this direction
answered please post to enthought-dev at mail.enthought.com or
mayavi-users at lists.sourceforge.net and I'll try and respond.
Doug> One IPython1 node collects the data necessary for the plot.
Doug> This node uses a visualization package to produce the plot
Doug> or visualization (a graph or geometry). This resulting
Doug> visualization is serialized and sent to the client. The
Doug> client can then view and further manipulate using a plotting
Doug> tool on their desktop machine.
Yes, this is what I think is done in ParaView. 2D is a lot easier but
3D is harder and AFAIK ParaView uses a library called IceT to do the
composting of the final image that is rendered on screen.
HTH.
cheers,
prabhu
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