No Arabic abstract
The usage of the high-level scripting language Python has enabled new mechanisms for data interrogation, discovery and visualization of scientific data. We present yt, an open source, community-developed astrophysical analysis and visualization toolkit for data generated by high-performance computing (HPC) simulations of astrophysical phenomena. Through a separation of responsibilities in the underlying Python code, yt allows data generated by incompatible, and sometimes even directly competing, astrophysical simulation platforms to be analyzed in a consistent manner, focusing on physically relevant quantities rather than quantities native to astrophysical simulation codes. We present on its mechanisms for data access, capabilities for MPI-parallel analysis, and its implementation as an in situ analysis and visualization tool.
The scientific community is presently witnessing an unprecedented growth in the quality and quantity of data sets coming from simulations and real-world experiments. To access effectively and extract the scientific content of such large-scale data sets (often sizes are measured in hundreds or even millions of Gigabytes) appropriate tools are needed. Visual data exploration and discovery is a robust approach for rapidly and intuitively inspecting large-scale data sets, e.g. for identifying new features and patterns or isolating small regions of interest within which to apply time-consuming algorithms. This paper presents a high performance parallelized implementation of Splotch, our previously developed visual data exploration and discovery algorithm for large-scale astrophysical data sets coming from particle-based simulations. Splotch has been improved in order to exploit modern massively parallel architectures, e.g. multicore CPUs and CUDA-enabled GPUs. We present performance and scalability benchmarks on a number of test cases, demonstrating the ability of our high performance parallelized Splotch to handle efficiently large-scale data sets, such as the outputs of the Millennium II simulation, the largest cosmological simulation ever performed.
X-ray astronomy is an important tool in the astrophysicists toolkit to investigate high-energy astrophysical phenomena. Theoretical numerical simulations of astrophysical sources are fully three-dimensional representations of physical quantities such as density, temperature, and pressure, whereas astronomical observations are two-dimensional projections of the emission generated via mechanisms dependent on these quantities. To bridge the gap between simulations and observations, algorithms for generating synthetic observations of simulated data have been developed. We present an implementation of such an algorithm in the yt analysis software package. We describe the underlying model for generating the X-ray photons, the important role that yt and other Python packages play in its implementation, and present a detailed workable example of the creation of simulated X-ray observations.
The Python package fluidsim is introduced in this article as an extensible framework for Computational Fluid Mechanics (CFD) solvers. It is developed as a part of FluidDyn project (Augier et al., 2018), an effort to promote open-source and open-science collaboration within fluid mechanics community and intended for both educational as well as research purposes. Solvers in fluidsim are scalable, High-Performance Computing (HPC) codes which are powered under the hood by the rich, scientific Python ecosystem and the Application Programming Interfaces (API) provided by fluiddyn and fluidfft packages (Mohanan et al., 2018). The present article describes the design aspects of fluidsim, viz. use of Python as the main language; focus on the ease of use, reuse and maintenance of the code without compromising performance. The implementation details including optimization methods, modular organization of features and object-oriented approach of using classes to implement solvers are also briefly explained. Currently, fluidsim includes solvers for a variety of physical problems using different numerical methods (including finite-difference methods). However, this metapaper shall dwell only on the implementation and performance of its pseudo-spectral solvers, in particular the two- and three-dimensional Navier-Stokes solvers. We investigate the performance and scalability of fluidsim in a state of the art HPC cluster. Three similar pseudo-spectral CFD codes based on Python (Dedalus, SpectralDNS) and Fortran (NS3D) are presented and qualitatively and quantitatively compared to fluidsim. The source code is hosted at Bitbucket as a Mercurial repository bitbucket.org/fluiddyn/fluidsim and the documentation generated using Sphinx can be read online at fluidsim.readthedocs.io.
The Astrophysical Multimessenger Observatory Network (AMON) has been built with the purpose of enabling near real-time coincidence searches using data from leading multimessenger observatories and astronomical facilities. Its mission is to evoke discovery of multimessenger astrophysical sources, exploit these sources for purposes of astrophysics and fundamental physics, and explore multimessenger datasets for evidence of multimessenger source population AMON aims to promote the advancement of multimessenger astrophysics by allowing its participants to study the most energetic phenomena in the universe and to help answer some of the outstanding enigmas in astrophysics, fundamental physics, and cosmology. The main strength of AMON is its ability to combine and analyze sub-threshold data from different facilities. Such data cannot generally be used stand-alone to identify astrophysical sources. The analyses algorithms used by AMON can identify statistically significant coincidence candidates of multimessenger events, leading to the distribution of AMON alerts used by partner observatories for real-time follow-up that may identify and, potentially, confirm the reality of the multimessenger association. We present the science motivation, partner observatories, implementation and summary of the current status of the AMON project.
The Tianlai Cylinder Pathfinder is a radio interferometer array designed to test techniques for 21 cm intensity mapping in the post-reionization Universe, with the ultimate aim of mapping the large scale structure and measuring cosmological parameters such as the dark energy equation of state. Each of its three parallel cylinder reflectors is oriented in the north-south direction, and the array has a large field of view. As the Earth rotates, the northern sky is observed by drift scanning. The array is located in Hongliuxia, a radio-quiet site in Xinjiang, and saw its first light in September 2016. In this first data analysis paper for the Tianlai cylinder array, we discuss the sub-system qualification tests, and present basic system performance obtained from preliminary analysis of the commissioning observations during 2016-2018. We show typical interferometric visibility data, from which we derive the actual beam profile in the east-west direction and the frequency band-pass response. We describe also the calibration process to determine the complex gains for the array elements, either using bright astronomical point sources, or an artificial on site calibrator source, and discuss the instrument response stability, crucial for transit interferometry. Based on this analysis, we find a system temperature of about 90 K, and we also estimate the sensitivity of the array.