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 or Jupyter Lab, add this “cell magic” to the first line of your notebook:

%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.