[Numpy-svn] r4829 - trunk/numpy/doc
numpy-svn at scipy.org
numpy-svn at scipy.org
Wed Feb 27 18:53:40 EST 2008
Author: rkern
Date: 2008-02-27 17:53:39 -0600 (Wed, 27 Feb 2008)
New Revision: 4829
Added:
trunk/numpy/doc/npy-format.txt
Log:
Add PEP-style document describing the NPY format.
Added: trunk/numpy/doc/npy-format.txt
===================================================================
--- trunk/numpy/doc/npy-format.txt 2008-02-27 23:00:48 UTC (rev 4828)
+++ trunk/numpy/doc/npy-format.txt 2008-02-27 23:53:39 UTC (rev 4829)
@@ -0,0 +1,294 @@
+Title: A Simple File Format for NumPy Arrays
+Discussions-To: numpy-discussion at mail.scipy.org
+Version: $Revision$
+Last-Modified: $Date$
+Author: Robert Kern <robert.kern at gmail.com>
+Status: Draft
+Type: Standards Track
+Content-Type: text/plain
+Created: 20-Dec-2007
+
+
+Abstract
+
+ We propose a standard binary file format (NPY) for persisting
+ a single arbitrary NumPy array on disk. The format stores all of
+ the shape and dtype information necessary to reconstruct the array
+ correctly even on another machine with a different architecture.
+ The format is designed to be as simple as possible while achieving
+ its limited goals. The implementation is intended to be pure
+ Python and distributed as part of the main numpy package.
+
+
+Rationale
+
+ A lightweight, omnipresent system for saving NumPy arrays to disk
+ is a frequent need. Python in general has pickle [1] for saving
+ most Python objects to disk. This often works well enough with
+ NumPy arrays for many purposes, but it has a few drawbacks:
+
+ - Dumping or loading a pickle file require the duplication of the
+ data in memory. For large arrays, this can be a showstopper.
+
+ - The array data is not directly accessible through
+ memory-mapping. Now that numpy has that capability, it has
+ proved very useful for loading large amounts of data (or more to
+ the point: avoiding loading large amounts of data when you only
+ need a small part).
+
+ Both of these problems can be addressed by dumping the raw bytes
+ to disk using ndarray.tofile() and numpy.fromfile(). However,
+ these have their own problems:
+
+ - The data which is written has no information about the shape or
+ dtype of the array.
+
+ - It is incapable of handling object arrays.
+
+ The NPY file format is an evolutionary advance over these two
+ approaches. Its design is mostly limited to solving the problems
+ with pickles and tofile()/fromfile(). It does not intend to solve
+ more complicated problems for which more complicated formats like
+ HDF5 [2] are a better solution.
+
+
+Use Cases
+
+ - Neville Newbie has just started to pick up Python and NumPy. He
+ has not installed many packages, yet, nor learned the standard
+ library, but he has been playing with NumPy at the interactive
+ prompt to do small tasks. He gets a result that he wants to
+ save.
+
+ - Annie Analyst has been using large nested record arrays to
+ represent her statistical data. She wants to convince her
+ R-using colleague, David Doubter, that Python and NumPy are
+ awesome by sending him her analysis code and data. She needs
+ the data to load at interactive speeds. Since David does not
+ use Python usually, needing to install large packages would turn
+ him off.
+
+ - Simon Seismologist is developing new seismic processing tools.
+ One of his algorithms requires large amounts of intermediate
+ data to be written to disk. The data does not really fit into
+ the industry-standard SEG-Y schema, but he already has a nice
+ record-array dtype for using it internally.
+
+ - Polly Parallel wants to split up a computation on her multicore
+ machine as simply as possible. Parts of the computation can be
+ split up among different processes without any communication
+ between processes; they just need to fill in the appropriate
+ portion of a large array with their results. Having several
+ child processes memory-mapping a common array is a good way to
+ achieve this.
+
+
+Requirements
+
+ The format MUST be able to:
+
+ - Represent all NumPy arrays including nested record
+ arrays and object arrays.
+
+ - Represent the data in its native binary form.
+
+ - Be contained in a single file.
+
+ - Support Fortran-contiguous arrays directly.
+
+ - Store all of the necessary information to reconstruct the array
+ including shape and dtype on a machine of a different
+ architecture. Both little-endian and big-endian arrays must be
+ supported and a file with little-endian numbers will yield
+ a little-endian array on any machine reading the file. The
+ types must be described in terms of their actual sizes. For
+ example, if a machine with a 64-bit C "long int" writes out an
+ array with "long ints", a reading machine with 32-bit C "long
+ ints" will yield an array with 64-bit integers.
+
+ - Be reverse engineered. Datasets often live longer than the
+ programs that created them. A competent developer should be
+ able create a solution in his preferred programming language to
+ read most NPY files that he has been given without much
+ documentation.
+
+ - Allow memory-mapping of the data.
+
+ - Be read from a filelike stream object instead of an actual file.
+ This allows the implementation to be tested easily and makes the
+ system more flexible. NPY files can be stored in ZIP files and
+ easily read from a ZipFile object.
+
+ - Store object arrays. Since general Python objects are
+ complicated and can only be reliably serialized by pickle (if at
+ all), many of the other requirements are waived for files
+ containing object arrays. Files with object arrays do not have
+ to be mmapable since that would be technically impossible. We
+ cannot expect the pickle format to be reverse engineered without
+ knowledge of pickle. However, one should at least be able to
+ read and write object arrays with the same generic interface as
+ other arrays.
+
+ - Be read and written using APIs provided in the numpy package
+ itself without any other libraries. The implementation inside
+ numpy may be in C if necessary.
+
+ The format explicitly *does not* need to:
+
+ - Support multiple arrays in a file. Since we require filelike
+ objects to be supported, one could use the API to build an ad
+ hoc format that supported multiple arrays. However, solving the
+ general problem and use cases is beyond the scope of the format
+ and the API for numpy.
+
+ - Fully handle arbitrary subclasses of numpy.ndarray. Subclasses
+ will be accepted for writing, but only the array data will be
+ written out. A regular numpy.ndarray object will be created
+ upon reading the file. The API can be used to build a format
+ for a particular subclass, but that is out of scope for the
+ general NPY format.
+
+
+Format Specification: Version 1.0
+
+ The first 6 bytes are a magic string: exactly "\x93NUMPY".
+
+ The next 1 byte is an unsigned byte: the major version number of
+ the file format, e.g. \x01.
+
+ The next 1 byte is an unsigned byte: the minor version number of
+ the file format, e.g. \x00. Note: the version of the file format
+ is not tied to the version of the numpy package.
+
+ The next 2 bytes form a little-endian unsigned short int: the
+ length of the header data HEADER_LEN.
+
+ The next HEADER_LEN bytes form the header data describing the
+ array's format. It is an ASCII string which contains a Python
+ literal expression of a dictionary. It is terminated by a newline
+ ('\n') and padded with spaces ('\x20') to make the total length of
+ the magic string + 4 + HEADER_LEN be evenly divisible by 16 for
+ alignment purposes.
+
+ The dictionary contains three keys:
+
+ "descr" : dtype.descr
+ An object that can be passed as an argument to the
+ numpy.dtype() constructor to create the array's dtype.
+
+ "fortran_order" : bool
+ Whether the array data is Fortran-contiguous or not.
+ Since Fortran-contiguous arrays are a common form of
+ non-C-contiguity, we allow them to be written directly to
+ disk for efficiency.
+
+ "shape" : tuple of int
+ The shape of the array.
+
+ For repeatability and readability, this dictionary is formatted
+ using pprint.pformat() so the keys are in alphabetic order.
+
+ Following the header comes the array data. If the dtype contains
+ Python objects (i.e. dtype.hasobject is True), then the data is
+ a Python pickle of the array. Otherwise the data is the
+ contiguous (either C- or Fortran-, depending on fortran_order)
+ bytes of the array. Consumers can figure out the number of bytes
+ by multiplying the number of elements given by the shape (noting
+ that shape=() means there is 1 element) by dtype.itemsize.
+
+
+Conventions
+
+ We recommend using the ".npy" extension for files following this
+ format. This is by no means a requirement; applications may wish
+ to use this file format but use an extension specific to the
+ application. In the absence of an obvious alternative, however,
+ we suggest using ".npy".
+
+ For a simple way to combine multiple arrays into a single file,
+ one can use ZipFile to contain multiple ".npy" files. We
+ recommend using the file extension ".npz" for these archives.
+
+
+Alternatives
+
+ The author believes that this system (or one along these lines) is
+ about the simplest system that satisfies all of the requirements.
+ However, one must always be wary of introducing a new binary
+ format to the world.
+
+ HDF5 [2] is a very flexible format that should be able to
+ represent all of NumPy's arrays in some fashion. It is probably
+ the only widely-used format that can faithfully represent all of
+ NumPy's array features. It has seen substantial adoption by the
+ scientific community in general and the NumPy community in
+ particular. It is an excellent solution for a wide variety of
+ array storage problems with or without NumPy.
+
+ HDF5 is a complicated format that more or less implements
+ a hierarchical filesystem-in-a-file. This fact makes satisfying
+ some of the Requirements difficult. To the author's knowledge, as
+ of this writing, there is no application or library that reads or
+ writes even a subset of HDF5 files that does not use the canonical
+ libhdf5 implementation. This implementation is a large library
+ that is not always easy to build. It would be infeasible to
+ include it in numpy.
+
+ It might be feasible to target an extremely limited subset of
+ HDF5. Namely, there would be only one object in it: the array.
+ Using contiguous storage for the data, one should be able to
+ implement just enough of the format to provide the same metadata
+ that the proposed format does. One could still meet all of the
+ technical requirements like mmapability.
+
+ We would accrue a substantial benefit by being able to generate
+ files that could be read by other HDF5 software. Furthermore, by
+ providing the first non-libhdf5 implementation of HDF5, we would
+ be able to encourage more adoption of simple HDF5 in applications
+ where it was previously infeasible because of the size of the
+ library. The basic work may encourage similar dead-simple
+ implementations in other languages and further expand the
+ community.
+
+ The remaining concern is about reverse engineerability of the
+ format. Even the simple subset of HDF5 would be very difficult to
+ reverse engineer given just a file by itself. However, given the
+ prominence of HDF5, this might not be a substantial concern.
+
+ In conclusion, we are going forward with the design laid out in
+ this document. If someone writes code to handle the simple subset
+ of HDF5 that would be useful to us, we may consider a revision of
+ the file format.
+
+
+Implementation
+
+ The current implementation is in the trunk of the numpy SVN
+ repository and will be part of the 1.0.5 release.
+
+ http://svn.scipy.org/svn/numpy/trunk
+
+ Specifically, the file format.py in this directory implements the
+ format as described here.
+
+
+References
+
+ [1] http://docs.python.org/lib/module-pickle.html
+
+ [2] http://hdf.ncsa.uiuc.edu/products/hdf5/index.html
+
+
+Copyright
+
+ This document has been placed in the public domain.
+
+
+
+Local Variables:
+mode: indented-text
+indent-tabs-mode: nil
+sentence-end-double-space: t
+fill-column: 70
+coding: utf-8
+End:
Property changes on: trunk/numpy/doc/npy-format.txt
___________________________________________________________________
Name: svn:eol-style
+ native
More information about the Numpy-svn
mailing list