GT4Py is still under development and is in an incomplete state. While GT4Py has been proven to work for some basic applications already, we are working actively on making GT4Py suitable for more use cases by adding Features, improving performance as well as reliability, adding a thorough documentation. GT4Py will be changing for the time being. New features will be implemented, APIs may change and dependencies will be added.
GT4Py is a Python library for generating high performance implementations of stencil kernels from a high-level definition using regular Python functions. GT4Py uses the GridTools Framework for a native implementation of the kernel, but other code-generating backends are also available.
The GridTools framework is a set of libraries and utilities to develop performance portable applications in the area of weather and climate. To achieve the goal of performance portability, the user-code is written in a generic form which is then optimized for a given architecture at compile-time. The core of GridTools is the stencil composition module which implements a DSL embedded in C++ for stencils and stencil-like patterns. Further, GridTools provides modules for halo exchanges, boundary conditions, data management and bindings to C and Fortran.
GT4Py contains a standard setup.py installation script that might be
installed as usual with pip. Two additional setup.py commands are
provided to install and remove the GridTools C++ sources, which are not
contained in the package. The complete installation procedure is thus:
# First, clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/gridtools/gt4py.git
# Then install the Python package
# add the '-e' flag if you want an editable installation
# add the '[cudaXX]' extra if you want to install the GPU backends
# (XX = 90, 91, 92, 100 or 101 depending on CUDA version 9.0, 9.1, ...)
pip install gt4py/ # pip install gt4py/[cudaXX]
# Finally run the command to install GridTools C++ sources
python gt4py/setup.py install_gt_sources
Note that pip will not delete the GridTools C++ sources when uninstalling the package, so make sure you run the remove command before:
python gt4py/setup.py remove_gt_sources
pip uninstall gt4py
A proper documentation is in the works. Please refer to the jupyter notebooks in the examples folder of this repository for examples how GT4Py can be used.
A short overview of the new features and changes planned for the coming weeks & months.
- Integration with Dawn compiler
- Update documentation (API reference, tutorial, notebooks and examples)
- Missing features
- Support for unstructured grids (GTScript extensions)
- Support for run-time values in interval definitions (run-time splitters)
- Support for different field layouts (storages masks)
- Support for OOP-based stencil definitions
- Support for boundary condition functions
- Support for proper function & stencil calls