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06 September, 2014

Scientific Python 101

As for the Mathematica 101, after the (long) introduction I'll be talking with code...

Introduction to "Scientific Python"

In this I'll assume a basic knowledge of Python, if you need to get up to speed, learnXinYminute is the best resource for a programmer.

With "Scientific Python" I refer to an ecosystem of python packages built around NumPy/SciPy/IPython. I recommend installing a scientific python distribution, I think Anaconda is by far the best (PythonXY is an alternative), you could grab the packages from pypi/pip from any Python distribution, but it's more of a hassle.

NumPy is the building block for most other packages. It provides a matlab-like n-dimensional array class that provides fast computation via Blas/Lapack. It can be compiled with a variety of Blas implementations (Intel's MKL, Atlas, Netlib's, OpenBlas...), a perk of using a good distribution is that it usually comes with the fastest option for your system (which usually is multithreaded MKL). SciPy adds more numerical analysis routines on top of the basic operations provided by NumPy.

IPython (Jupyter) is a notebook-like interface similar to Mathematica's (really, it's a client-server infrastructure with different clients, but the only one that really matters is the HTML-based notebook one). 
An alternative environment is Spyder, which is more akin to Matlab's or Mathematica Workbench (a classic IDE) and also embeds IPython consoles for immediate code execution.

Especially when learning, it's probably best to start with IPython Notebooks.

Why I looked into SciPy

While I really like Mathematica for exploratory programming and scientific computation, there are a few reasons that compelled me to look for an alternative (other than Wolfram being an ass that I hate having to feed).

First of all, Mathematica is commercial -and- expensive (same as Matlab btw). Which really doesn't matter when I use it as a tool to explore ideas and make results that will be used somewhere else, but it's really bad as a programming language.

I wouldn't really want to redistribute the code I write in it, and even deploying "executables" is not free. Not to mention not many people know Mathematica to begin with.
Python, in comparison, is very well known, free, and integrated pretty much everywhere. I can drop my code directly in Maya (or any other package really, python is everywhere) for artists to use, for example.

Another big advantage is that Python is familiar, even for people that don't know it, it's a simple imperative scripting language.
Mathematica is in contrast a very odd Lisp, which will look strange at first even to people who know other Lisps. Also, it's mostly about symbolic computation, and the way it evaluate can be quite mysterious. CPython internals on the other hand, can be quite easily understood.

Lastly, a potential problem lies in the fact that python packages aren't guaranteed to have all the same licensing terms, and you might need many of them. Verifying that everything you end up installing can be used for commercial purposes is a bit of a hassle...

How does it fare?

It's free. It's integrated everywhere. It's familiar. It has lots of libraries. It works. It -can- be used as a Mathematica or Matlab replacement, while being free, so every time you need to redistribute your work (research!) it should be considered.

But it has still (many) weaknesses.

As a tool for exploratory programming, Mathematica is miles aheadIts documentation is great, it comes with a larger wealth of great tools and its visualization options are probably the best bar none.
Experimentation is an order of magnitude better if you have good visualization and interactivity support, and Mathematica, right now, kills the competition on that front. 
Manipulate[] is extremely simple, plotting is decently fast and the quality is quite high, there is lots of thought behind how the plots work, picking reasonable defaults, being numerically reliable and so on.

In Python on the other hand you get IPython and matplotlib. Ok, you got a ton of other libraries too, but matplotlib is popular and the basis of many others too. 
IPython can't display output if assignments are made, and displays only the last evaluated expression. Matplotlib is really slow, really ugly, and uses a ton of memory. Also you can either get it integrated in IPython, but with zero interactivity, or in a separate window, with just very bare-bones support for plot rotation/translation/scale.

There are other tools you can use, but most are 2D only, some are very fast and 3D but more cumbersome to use and so on and so forth...
Update: nowadays there are a few more libraries using WebGL, which are both fast and allow interactivity in IPython!

As a CAS I also expect Mathematica to be the best, you can do CAS in Python via SymPy/Sage/Mathics but I don't rely too much on that, personally, so I'm not in a position to evaluate.

Overall, I'll still be using Mathematica for many tasks, it's a great tool.

As a tool for numerical computation it fares better. Its main rival would be Matlab, whose strength really lies in the great toolboxes Mathworks provides. 
Even if the SciPy ecosystem is large with a good community, there are many areas where its packages are lacking, not well supported or immature.

Sadly though for the most Matlab is not that popular because of the unique functionality it provides, but because MathWorks markets well to the academia and it became the language of choice for many researchers and courses.
Also, researchers don't care about redistributing source nearly as much as they really should, this day and age it's all still about printed publications...

So, is Matlab dead? Not even close, and to be honest, there are many issues Python has to solve. Overall though, things are shifting already, and I really can't see a bright future for Matlab or its clones, as fundamentally Python is a much better language, and for research being open is probably the most important feature. We'll see.

A note on performance and exploration

For some reason, most of the languages for scientific exploratory programming are really slow. Python, Matlab, Mathematica, they are all fairly slow languages. 

The usual argument is that it doesn't matter at all, because these are scripting languages used to glue very high-performance numerical routines. And I would totally agree. If it didn't matter.
A language for exploratory programming has to be expressive and high-level, but also fast enough for the abstractions not to fall on their knees. Sadly, Python isn't.

Even with simple code, if you're processing a modicum amount of data, you'll need to know its internals, and the variety of options available for optimization. It's similar in this regard to Mathematica, where using functions like Compile often requires planning the code up-front to fit in the restrictions of such optimizers.

Empirically though it seems that the amount of time I had to spend minding performance patterns in Python is even higher than what I do in Mathematica. I suspect it's because many packages are pure python.

It's true that you can do all the optimization staying inside the interactive environment, not needing to change languages. That's not bad. But if you start having to spend a significant amount of time thinking about performance, instead of transforming data, it's a problem.

Also, it's a mystery to me why most scientific languages are not built for multithreading, at all. All of them, Python, Matlab and Mathematica, execute only some underlying C code in parallel (e.g. blas routines). But not anything else (all the routines not written in native code, often things such as plots, optimizers, integrators).

Even Julia, which was built specifically for performance, doesn't really do multithreading so far, just "green" threads (one at a time, like python) and multiprocessing.

Multiprocessing in Python is great, IPython makes it a breeze to configure a cluster of machines or even many processes on a local machine. But it still requires order of magnitudes more effort than threading, killing interactivity (push global objects, imports, functions, all manually across instances).

Mathematica at least does the multiprocessing data distribution automatically, detecting dependencies and input data that need to be transferred.

Learn by example: 



Other resources:

Tutorials
Packages
  • Scipy: numpy, scipy, matplotlib, sympy, pandas
  • Optimization and learning
  • Dill, a package that can serialize/snapshot a python kernel. Useful when one wants to stop working on an iPython session but want to be able to pick it up again from the same state next time.
  • Performance
    • A comparison of Cython, Numba, PyCuda, PyOpenCl, NumPy and other frameworks on a simple problem (Mandelbrot set)
    • SciPy Weave, inlines C code in Python code, compiles and links to python on demand. Deprecated. Try Cython instead.
    • Numba, a numpy "aware" compiler, targets LLVM, compiles in runtime (annotated functions)
    • Cython, compiles annotated python to C. Bottleneck uses it to accelerate some NumPy functions. (see also ShedskinPythran and ocl)
    • JobLib, makes multiprocessing easier (see IPython.Parallel too) but still not great as you can't have multithreading, multiprocessing means you'll have to send data around independent python interpreters :/
    • NumExpr, a fast interpreter of numerical expressions on arrays. Faster than numpy by aggregating operations (instead of doing one at at time)
    • WeldNumpy is another faster interpreter, the idea here is to lazy-evaluate expressions to be able to execute them more optimally.
    • Theano, targets cpu and gpu, numpy aware, automatic differentiation. Clumsy...
    • Nuikta, offline compiles python to C++, should support all extensions
    • PyPy, a JIT, with a tracing interpreter written in python. Doesn't support all extensions (the CPython C library interface)
    • Python/Cuda links
  • Non-homogeneous data
    • Blaze, like numpy but for non-homogeneous, incomplete data
    • PyTables, hierarchical data
  • Graphics/Plotting
    • For 3d animations, VisVis seems the only tool that is capable of achieving decent speed, quality, and has a good interface and support. It has a matlab-like interface, but actually creating objects (Line() instead of plot...) is much better/faster.
      • Update: Its successor is VisPy, at the time I first wrote this, it was still experimental. I have not tried it yet, but it seems better now.
      • Update: Ipyvolume seems viable too. 
    • Bokeh, nice plotting library, 2d only, outputs HTML5/JS so it can be interacted with in IPython Notebook. Somewhat lower-level than Matplotlib, albeit it does provide a bunch of plotting functions
      • Chaco is another 2d plot/gui library, very OO, similar to Bokeh it might require more code to create a graph
    • Matplotlib toolkits (MPL is SLOW and rather ugly, but it's the most supported):
      • Mplot3d, quite crappy 3d plots
      • Seaborn, good looking 2d plots
      • mpld3, a matplotlib compatible library that emits HTML5/JS using d3.js
      • NodeBox OpenGL is nifty, and DrawBot is very similar too (but OSX only at the moment). They actually derive from the same base sourcecode.
      • Point Cloud Library and PyGTS, Gnu Triangulated Surface Library
      • Others:
    # For anaconda windows distribution, to use mayavi you need to install
    # mayavi and wxpython, use from command line binstar search -t conda mayavi
    %gui wx
    %pylab wx
    %matplotlib inline
    # In Ipython Notebook %matplotlib has to come after pylab, it seems. 

    # "inline" is cool but "qt" and "wx" allows interactivity

    # qt is faster than wx, but mayavi requires wx

        • PyQwt 2d/3d library, faster than matplotlib but even uglier. PyQtGraph is another similar project. Good if interactivity is needed. Also provide GUI components to code interactive graphs.
        • DisLin, 2d/3d graphs. Does not seem to support animations
    Other

    03 September, 2014

    Notes on real-time renderers

    This accounts only for well-established methods, there are many other methods and combinations of methods I'm not covering. It's a sort of "recap".

    Forward
    Single pass over geometry generates "final" image, lights are bound to draw calls (via uniforms), accurate culling of light influence on geometry requires CSG splits. Multiple lights require either loops/branches in the shaders or shader permutations.
    • Benefits
      • Fastest in its baseline case (single light per pixel, "simple" shaders or even baked lighting). Doesn't have a "constant" up-front investment, you pay as you go (more lights, more textures...).
      • Least memory necessary (least bandwidth, at least in theory). Makes MSAA possible.
      • Easy to integrate with shadowmaps (can render them one-at-a-time, or almost)
      • No extra pass over geometry
      • Any material, except ones that require screen-space passes like Jimenez's SS-SSS
    • Issues
      • Culling lights on geometry requires geometrical splits (not a huge deal, actually). Can support "static" variations of shaders to customize for a given rendering case (number/type of lights, number of textures and so on) but "pays" such optimization with combinatorial explosion of shader cases and many more draw calls.
      • Culling dynamic lights can't be efficiently done. Scripted lights along fixed paths can be somewhat culled via geometry cutting, but fully dynamic lights can't efficiently cut geometry in runtime, just be assigned to objects, thus wasting computation.
      • Decals need to be multipass, lit twice. Alternatively, for static decals mesh can be cut and texture layering used (more shader variations), or for dynamic decals color can be splatted before main pass (but that costs an access to the offscreen buffer regardless or not a decal is there).
      • Complex shaders might not run optimally. As you have to do texturing and lighting (and shadowing) in the same pass, shaders can require a lot of registers and yield limited occupancy. Accessing many textures in sequence might create more trashing than accessing them in separate passes.
      • Lighting/texturing variations have to be dealt with dynamic branches which are often problematic for the shader compiler (must allocate registers for the worst case...), conditional moves (wasted work and registers) or shader permutations (combinatorial explosion)
      • Many "modern" rending effects require a depth/normal pre-pass anyways (i.e. SSAO, screen-space shadows, reflections and so on). Even though some of these can be faded out after a preset range and thus they can work with a partial pre-pass.
      • All shading is done on geometry, which means we pay all the eventual inefficiencies (e.g. partial quads, overdraw) on all shaders.

    Forward+ (light indexed)
    Forward+ is basically identical to forward but doesn't do any geometry split on the scene as a pre-pass, it relies on tiles or 3d grids ("clustered") to cull lights in runtime.
    • Benefits
      • Same memory as forward, more bandwidth. Enables MSAA.
      • Any material (same as forward)
      • Compared to forward, no mesh splitting necessary, much less shader permutations, less draw calls.
      • Compared to forward it handles dynamic lights with good culling.
    • Issues
      • Light occlusion culling requires a full depth pre-pass for a total of two geometrical passes. Can be somehow sidestepped with a clustered light grid, if you don't have to end up splatting too many lights into it.
      • All shadowmaps need to be generated upfront (more memory) or splatted in screen-space in a pre-pass.
      • All lighting permutations need to be addressed as dynamic branches in the shader. Not good if we need to support many kinds of light/shadow types. In cases where simple lighting is needed, still has to pay the price of a monolithic ubershader that has to consider any lighting scenario.
      • Compared to forward, seems a steep price to pay to just get rid of geometry cutting. Note that even if it "solved" shader permutations, its solution is the same as doing forward with shaders that dynamic branch over light types/number of lights and setting these parameters per draw call.

    Deferred shading
    Geometry pass renders a buffer of material attributes (and other proprieties needed for lighting but bound to geometry, e.g. lightmaps, vertex-baked lighting...). Lighting is computed in screenspace either by rendering volumes (stencil) or by using tiling. Multiple shading equations need either to be handled via branches in the lighting shaders, or via multiple passes per light.
    • Benefits
      • Decouples texturing from lighting. Executes only texturing on geometry so it suffers less from partial quads, overdraw. Also, potentially can be faster on complex shaders (as discussed in the forward rendering issues).
      • Allows volumetric or multipass decals (and special effects) on the GBuffer (without computing the lighting twice).
      • Allows full-screen material passes like analytic geometric specular antialiasing (pre-filtering), which really works only done on the GBuffer, in forward it fails on all hard edges (split normals), and screen-space subsurface scattering.
      • Less draw calls, less shader permutations, one or few lighting shaders that can be hand-optimized well.
    • Issues
      • Uses more memory and bandwidth. Might be slower due to more memory communication needed, especially on areas with simple lighting.
      • Doesn't handle transparencies easily. If a tiled or clustered deferred is used, the light information can be passed to a forward+ pass for transparencies.
      • Limits materials that need many different material parameters to be passed from geometry to lighting (GBuffer), even if shader variation for material in a modern PBR renderer tends not to be a problem.
      • Can't do lighting computations per object/vertex (i.e. GI), needs to pass everything per pixel in the GBuffer. An alternative is to store baked data in a voxel structure.
      • Accessing lighting related textures (gobos, cubemaps) might be less cache-coherent.
      • In general it has lots of enticing benefits over forward, and it -might- be faster in complex lighting/material/decal scenarios, but the baseline simple lighting/shading case is much more expensive.
    Notes on tiled/clustered versus "stenciled" techniques
    On older hardware early-stencil was limited to a single bit, so it couldn't be used both to mark the light volume and distinguish surface types. Tiled could be needed as it allowed more material variety by categorizing tiles and issuing multiple tile draws if needed.

    On newer hardware tiled benefits lie in the ability of reducing bandwidth by processing all lights in a tile in a single shader. It also has some benefits for very small lights as these might stall early in the pipeline of the rasterizer, if drawn as volumes (draws that generate too little PS work). 

    In fact most tile renderers demos like to show thousands of lights in view... But the reality is that it's still tricky to afford many shadowed lights per pixel in any case (even on nextgen where we have enough memory to cache shadowmaps), and unshadowed, cheap lights are worse than no lighting at all.

    Often, these cheap unshadowed lights are used as "fill", a cheap replacement for GI. This is not an unreasonable use case, but there are better ways, and standard lights, even when diffuse only, are actually not a great representation of indirect radiance. 
    Voxel, vertex and lightmap bakes are often superior, or one could thing of special fill volumes that can take more space, embedding some radiance representation and falloff in them.

    In fact one of the typical "deferred" looks that many games still have today is characterized by "many" cheap point lights without shadowing (nor GI, nor gobos...), creating ugly circular splotches in the scene. 
    Also tiled/clustered makes dynamic shadows somewhat harder, as you can't render one shadowmap at a time...

    Tiled and clustered have their reasons, but demo scenes with thousands of cheap point lights are not one. Mostly they are interesting if you can compute other interesting data per tile/voxel.
    You can still get a BW saving in "realistic" scenes with low overlap of lighting volumes, but it's a tradeoff between that and accurate per-quad light culling you get from a modern early-z volume renderer.

    Deferred lighting
    I'd say this is dwindling technique nowadays compared to deferred shading.
    • Benefits
      • It requires less memory per pass, but the total memory traffic summing all passes is roughly the same. The former used to be -very- important due to the limited EDRAM memory on xbox 360 (and its inability to render outside EDRAM).
      • In theory allows more material "hacks", but it's still very limited. In fact I'd say the material expressiveness is identical to deferred shading, but you can add "extra" lighting in the second geometry pass. On deferred shading that has to be passed along using extra GBuffer space.
      • Allows shadows to be generated and used per light, instead of all upfront like deferred shading/forward+
    • Issues
      • An extra geometric pass (could be avoided by using the same GBuffer as deferred shading, then doing lighting and compositing with the textures in separate fullscreen passes - but then it's almost more a variant of DS than DL imho)
    Some Links: