Hi Fernando, John, I wanted to restart the discussion around Matplotlib, IPython, and the entire scientific/mathematical environment idea on OLPC laptops. I responded to the mail below previously, but I'm not sure what happened after that.
Arjun Sarwal, who is the author of the Measure activity that I demonstrated at SciPy, has recently been looking into plotting libraries for the XO, and (understandably) Matplotlib caught his eye. Arjun and others -- I'm forwarding Fernando's original e-mail below for your reference. I am in full support of the Matplotlib/sympy/IPython combo getting up and running on the XO, on the way to an awesome complete sci/math environment. I hope Fernando and John will still consider giving us a hand. Thanks! Cheers, Ivan. On Aug 19, 2007, at 10:38 PM, Fernando Perez wrote: > In order to estimate the sizes one could expect to see with a > matplotlib build for the OLPC, I tried to build it with only the GTK > Cairo backend (though AGG still needs to be built for internal use, > since it's everywhere) and then added GTKAgg as well. These were the > sizes I got: > > tlon[build]> d *.tgz > /home/installers/src/scipy/matplotlib/build > -rw-r--r-- 1 fperez 4674627 2007-08-19 19:43 mpl_cairo_only.tgz > -rw-r--r-- 1 fperez 5555121 2007-08-19 20:25 mpl_with_gtkagg.tgz > > However, the Cairo backend is still not very mature and doesn't > perform very well; in particular it lacks proper transparency support, > so using GTK+Agg might be a better alternative. These sizes are what > I got from doing a build and quickly removing some obvious things (as > well as deactivating support for Qt, Tk and WX). It's quite likely > that John might suggest how to trim it further, I was afraid of > cutting things I shouldn't so I went in conservatively. > > John will correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that since you already > ship a real GTK, the GTKAgg backend should work just fine. Agg is > very fast, has extremely high quality, and the GTKAgg backend is > probably the most mature and widely tested one of all. If 5.5 MB is > an acceptable size for you, here are the numbers for the other pieces > of the puzzle. > > For IPython: > > -rw-r--r-- 1 fperez 713456 2007-08-19 21:18 > ipython_installed_nodocs.tgz > -rw-r--r-- 1 fperez 808717 2007-08-19 21:16 ipython_installed.tgz > > IPython comes in at a bit under 1MB, keeping the source and HTML > manual but removing the PDF docs. Removing the HTML manual saves > about 100k. > > As for sympy, I just installed it and tarred it: > > -rw-r--r-- 1 fperez 1686428 2007-08-19 21:21 sympy_installed.tgz > > I'm not familiar enough with it to know what can be cut out, though I > know their 3d plotting is OpenGL based, so that can probably go. > You'd need to get the sympy team involved, though Ondrej sounded > enthusiastic when I spoke with him. > > > So it looks like the ipython/matplotlib/sympy combo would cost you > around 8MB total. That's not counting numpy, but you told me you'd > already decided to include that for other reasons (matplotlib can't > run without numpy, nor can one do many key numerical operations > without it at reasonable speeds). > > One final question: have you run any numpy code on the olpc to get an > idea for its floating-point performance? Here are a couple of > reference points and an easy way to get some timing info: > > On my 5 1/2 year old laptop, a Pentium-III at 1.13 GHz with only SSE > (no SSE2) instructions, a typical test time for numpy is: > > maqroll[~]> time python -c "import numpy;numpy.test(10)" > & /dev/null > 3.484u 0.196s 0:03.73 98.3% 0+0k 0+0io 0pf+0w > > On my desktop, a dual-core Athlon 4400 (2.2GHz clock): > > tlon[~/tmp]> time python -c "import numpy;numpy.test(10)" > & /dev/ > null > 1.420u 0.144s 0:01.56 100.0% 0+0k 0+0io 0pf+0w > > > My laptop is perfectly usable as a matplotlib/numpy computing > environment at these speed, and you could probably take a factor of 4 > hit on performance and still be OK for the numerics. The graphics may > get a little unpleasant if your box is much more than 2-4 times slower > than my laptop, I suspect, but it might be OK. Also, I think that if > one disables Agg and uses only the plain GTK backend, things go faster > (John will correct me if I'm wrong). > > > In any case, I hope you find this useful. Feel free to forward it to > those on your team you deem appropriate. -- Ivan Krstić <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | http://radian.org _______________________________________________ Sugar mailing list [email protected] http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/sugar
