openPMD-viewer

openPMD-viewer is an open-source Python package to access openPMD data.

It allows to:

  • Quickly browse through the data, with a GUI-type interface in the Jupyter notebook

  • Have access to the data numpy array, for more detailed analysis

Installation

openPMD-viewer can be installed via conda or pip:

conda install -c conda-forge openpmd-viewer openpmd-api

python3 -m pip install openPMD-viewer openPMD-api

Usage

openPMD-viewer can be used either in simple Python scripts or in Jupyter. For interactive plots in Jupyter notebook, add this “cell magic” to the first line of your notebook:

%matplotlib notebook

and for Jupyter Lab use this instead:

%matplotlib widget

If none of those work, e.g. because ipympl is not properly installed, you can as a last resort always try %matplotlib inline for non-interactive plots.

In both interactive and scripted usage, you can import openPMD-viewer, and load the data with the following commands:

from openpmd_viewer import OpenPMDTimeSeries
ts = OpenPMDTimeSeries('./diags/diag1/')

Note

If you are using the Jupyter notebook, then you can start a pre-filled notebook, which already contains the above lines, by typing in a terminal:

openPMD_notebook

When using the Jupyter notebook, you can quickly browse through the data by using the command:

ts.slider()

You can also access the particle and field data as numpy arrays with the methods ts.get_field and ts.get_particle. See the openPMD-viewer tutorials here for more info.