I have been working with openDX for along time, and a topic which
often comes up on this group is how to make periodic boundary
conditions on a dataset, so that (for example) latitude, longitude
data can be properly wrapped to be continuous. I know the canonical
solution, which is to extend the data by one row or column with the
contents of the first row or column.
This has often seemed inelegant to me, given the amount of juggling
it takes in VPE networks to achieve, and the fact that this is easy
to handle in the DX data model in theory.
I am wondering if any of the active developers here have a read on
how hard it would be to extend the 'gridconnections' objects to allow
a flag for periodicity in each dimension, so that the gridconnection
would wrap back at the end. Doing this directly in the core of
openDX would allow the very efficient computations which
gridconnections permit (Map, etc.) to be carried out in the very
common periodic case.
Any thoughts?
Marcus Mendenhall
Vanderbilt University FEL Center
