Jacob Hummel edited 1-Introduction.tex  almost 8 years ago

Commit id: 261708ce96f72b90fb02d4481d35706a380f5567

deletions | additions      

       

Recently, the scientific python community has begun to converge on the \code{DataFrame} provided by the high-performance \code{pandas} data analysis library as a common data structure.   As a result, once data is loaded into a \code{DataFrame}, it becomes much easier to take advantage of the powerful analysis tools provided by the broader scientific computing ecosystem.  With this in mind, we present a \code{pandas}-based framework for analyzing \textsc{gadget} simulation data, \textsc{gadfly}: the \textsc{GAdget} DataFrame LibrarY.  Rather than providing an alternative to the existing \code{yt} and \code{pynbody} projects, the aim of the \code{gadfly} project is to ease interoperability with the python ecosystem at large, lowering the barrier for access to the tools created by this broader community.  In this paper we present the first public release (v0.1) of \code{gadfly}, which is available at \code{http://github.com/hummel/gadfly}.  Rather than providing an alternative to the existing \code{yt} and \code{pynbody} projects, the aim of the \code{gadfly} project is to   The framework design and organizational structure are outlined in Section \ref{sec:framework}, followed by a description of the included SPH particle rendering in Section \ref{sec:vis}. Our plans for future development are outlined in Section \ref{sec:future}, and a summary is provided in Section \ref{sec:summary}.