[SciPy-user] Real-time plotting and data storage format questions

[Gary Pajer]

On Tue, Apr 1, 2008 at 12:36 PM, heytrent at gmail.com <heytrent at gmail.com> wrote:
> Greetings,
>
> A small team of us are developing a new simulation package from the ground
> up. Our legacy approach relied on MATLAB and other proprietary software. A
> hope pf ours is to be able to shed the use of MATLAB for the analysis of our
> simulation results and instead use python with scipy/numpy/matplotlib etc.
> I've successfully installed and compiled optimized numpy/scipy and all the
> supporting packages (ATLAS, FFTW, etc).
>
> So far so good.
>
> To the point - I have two questions:
>
> 1) We would like to have a "scope" to monitor simulation outputs in real
> time. We're using one tool that can take data over a tcp/ip port, but is
> clunky and only works on a single platform. Does such a thing exists within
> the python realm for plotting data in real time?

Not sure of your detailed needs, but I can point out some options.
One typical problem in python 'scope applications is speed.  Most
current graphics solutions weren't designed with realtime use in mind.
 Nonetheless, the ones that are being actively developed (e.g.
matplotlib) are better than they used to be.

 Pmw-Blt.   This is pretty fast, but development has all but stopped.
But not entirely stopped.  Too bad.  It's the fastest solution that I
found in a not-exhaustive search.  Look out: the Linux version of the
current release has a library bug, and it's necessary to set an
environment variable to get it to work. This is not documented, AFAIK

I'm currently writing a realtime data acquisition/display application,
but speed is not critical.  I'm using Enthought Tool Suite (ETS) and
Traits, and Chaco for data display.  IMHO, I think that in five years
ETS/Traits will be the most commonly used framework for scientific
applications.


>
> 2) Our simulation creates large (1-4 GB) data sets. Since we're writing this
> simulation ourselves (C++) we can save the data in any format. Does anyone
> have a suggestion for a specific format or API that's been found to be
> optimal in terms of memory usage and ability to import into python for
> analysis and plotting?
>
> Thank you for any suggestions. We're still new with Python, so I apologize
> if these questions seem mundane.
>
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