ASAPTools 0.6.0

Overview

The ASAP (Application Scalability And Performance) group at the National Center for Atmospheric Research maintains this collection of simple Python tools for managing tasks commonly used with its Python software. The modules contained in this package include:

vprinter:

For managing print messages with verbosity-level specification

timekeeper:

For managing multiple “stop watches” for timing metrics

partition:

For various data partitioning algorithms

simplecomm:

For simple MPI communication

Only the simplecomm module depends on anything beyond the basic built-in Python packages.

Dependencies

All of the ASAP Python Toolbox are written to work with Python 2.6+ (including Python 3+). The vprinter, timekeeper, and partition modules are pure Python. The simplecomm module depends on mpi4py (>=1.3).

This implies the dependency:

• mpi4py depends on numpy (>-1.4) and MPI

Easy Installation

The easiest way to install the ASAP Python Toolbox is from the Python Package Index (PyPI) with the pip package manager:

$  pip install [--user] ASAPTools

The optional ‘–user’ argument can be used to install the package in the local user’s directory, which is useful if the user doesn’t have root privileges.

Obtaining the Source Code

Currently, the most up-to-date source code is available via git from the site:

https://github.com/NCAR/ASAPPyTools

Check out the most recent tag. The source is available in read-only mode to everyone, but special permissions can be given to those to make changes to the source.

Building & Installation

Installation of the ASAP Python Toolbox is very simple. After checking out the source from the above svn link, via:

$  git clone https://github.com/NCAR/ASAPPyTools

change into the top-level source directory, check out the most recent tag, and run the Python distutils setup. On unix, this involves:

$  cd ASAPPyTools
$  python setup.py install [--prefix-/path/to/install/location]

The prefix is optional, as the default prefix is typically /usr/local on linux machines. However, you must have permissions to write to the prefix location, so you may want to choose a prefix location where you have write permissions. Like most distutils installations, you can alternatively install the pyTools with the –user option, which will automatically select (and create if it does not exist) the $HOME/.local directory in which to install. To do this, type (on unix machines):

$  python setup.py install --user

This can be handy since the site-packages directory will be common for all user installs, and therefore only needs to be added to the PYTHONPATH once.

To build the documentation for developer use, you will need Sphinx. Sphinx can be installed with the pip utility simple:

$  pip install Sphinx

Once Sphinx is installed, you can build the ASAP Python Toolbox’s HTML documentation with:

$  cd docs
$  make html

which will build the documentation in the docs/build/html directory. If you wish to build a PDF, do the following:

$  cd docs
$  make latexpdf

which requires pdflatex to build a PDF version of the documentation.

Before Using the ASAP Python Toolbox

Before the ASAP Python Toolbox package can be used, you must make sure that the site-packages directory containing the ‘pytools’ source directory is in your PYTHONPATH. Depending on the PREFIX used during installation, this path will be:

$PREFIX/lib/python2.X/site-packages

where X will be 6 or 7 (or other) depending on the version of Python that you are using to install the package.

Instructions & Use

For instructions on how to use the ASAP Python Toolbox, see the additional documentation found in the docs directory. Please read the ‘Building & Installation’ section above for instructions on how to build the HTML documentation. Once built, you will be able to open the ‘docs/build/html/index.html’ page in any browser.