[SciPy-user] Mapping a series of files.

[Dharhas Pothina]

Hi,

I've been following the thread on 'partially reading a file' with some interest and have a related question.

So I have a series of large binary data files (1_data.dat, 2_data.dat, etc) that represent a 3D time series of data. Right now I am cycling through all the files reading the entire dataset to memory and extracting the subset I need. This works but is extremely memory hungry and slow and I'm running out of memory for datasets more than a year long. I could calculate which few files contain the  data I need and only read those in but that is a bit cumbersome and also doesn't help if I need a 1d or 2d slice of the whole time period.

In the other thread Travis gave an example of using memmap to map a file to memory. Can I do this to with multiple files. ie use memmap to generate an array[x,y,z,t] that I can then use slicing to actually read what I need? Another complication is that each binary file has a header section and then a data section. By reading the first file I can calculate the offset for the data part of the file.

thanks,

- dharhas