Jacob Hummel edited Introduction.tex  about 8 years ago

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\section{Introduction}  \label{intro} \label{sec:intro}  In the past decade, astrophysical simulations have increased dramatically in both size and sophistication, and the typical size of the datasets produced has grown accordingly.   However, the software tools for analyzing such datasets have not kept pace, such that one of the primary barriers to exploratory investigation is simply manipulating the data.  

With this in mind, we present a \code{pandas}-based framework for analyzing \textsc{gadget} simulation data, \textsc{gadfly}: the \textsc{GAdget} \code{DataFrame} LibrarY.  In this paper we present the first public release (v0.1) of \code{gadfly}.   The framework design and organizational structure are outlined in Section \ref{framework}, \ref{sec:framework},  followed by a description of the included SPH particle rendering (Section \ref{visualization}) \ref{sec:vis})  and parallel batch processing (Section \ref{batch_processing}) \ref{sec:parallel})  capabilities. Our plans for future development are outlined in Section \ref{future}, \ref{sec:future},  and a summary is provided in Section \ref{summary}. \ref{sec:summary}.  %This project is in no way expected to be a replacement for the far more feature-complete yt or pynbody projects. Rather, we focus instead on implementing the minimum functionality necessary to interface between simulation data in the GADGET HDF5 format, and the pandas data analysis library.