Interface for Urs' particle pusher

[ohannuks]

We'll be doing an easy-to-use interface for Urs' particle pusher.

Features:

• Click-and-point tool for inputting particles into a certain place in spatial space
• Velocity sampling:
  • Input particles based on the bulk velocity
  • Input particles based on the velocity distribution (sample the velocity distribution)
    • Input particles based on random sampling
    • Input particles based on population
    • Input particles based on avgs value
  • Add velocity sampling with k-means clustering to look at interesting places and e.g. draw only 1 line for 20 particles
  • Color the particle trajectories according to density
• Read particle info output from the particle pusher
• Draw particle trajectory lines in MayaVi of the particle paths

[galfthan]

This will be especially cool demo on the new fast visualization machine

[ohannuks]

Yup it will! And we had some grand ideas for making clustering in it so we launch loads of particles and look if there's certain populations going in different directions. Urs suggested k-means clustering!

[ohannuks]

Particles now inputted by sampling the velocity space! 👍

[iljah]

We'll be doing an easy-to-use interface for Urs' particle pusher.
Features:

• Click-and-point tool for inputting particles into a certain place in
  spatial space
• Velocity sampling:
  o Input particles based on the bulk velocity
  o Input particles based on the velocity distribution (sample the
  velocity distribution)
  o Input particles based on some vertain population (note: needs to
  be able to separate particle populations)
• Read particle info output from the particle pusher
• Draw streamlines in MayaVi of the particle paths

This sounds interesting, will the particle tracing happen interactively?
Does the pusher have to be implemented using a particular language?

[ykempf]

The pusher is already implemented, @iljah. And yes, in one mode there is now a point-and-click tool which launches a set of particles from the point you select and traces immediately (i.e. asap or rather asac–computed) the paths.

[ursg]

Yep, I just took the particle propagator out of my particle-in-cell code and I'm feeding it field data from vlsv files. See the particles/ directory in the master branch.

The python interface isn't fully userfriendly yet, but we're getting there.

[ohannuks]

Yup it's interactive in the sense that you create the particles and push them, and see results! You can then keep on analyzing data. The particle pusher is the amazing thing Urs made and I'm working on making an easy-to-use interface for it which makes data analysis and particle injection with certain population shapes easier.

[ohannuks]

@ursg in case you want to work on this, Ill keep this issue here.

[rjarvinen]

Edit: Ah, never mind. I need to compile the pusher first. It is not included in the python package.

I get an error when trying to open Particlepusherinterface according to this example and using a bulk file from BCB run:
https://github.com/fmihpc/analysator/blob/master/Documentation/examples/example1.py

>>> grid = pt.grid.Particlepusherinterface(f, 'rho')
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "", line 1, in 
TypeError: __init__() takes at least 4 arguments (3 given)