Read openPMD Data

openPMD is implemented in popular community formats such as ADIOS and HDF5.

To start, there are two popular Python libraries to interact with openPMD data:

• openPMD-viewer
• openPMD-api

The viewer provides a simple python interface to open particle and field data, and perform other more advanced analysis, such as reconstructing the trajectories of selected particles. However, not all the original openPMD metadata is provided. This is not a limitation in many cases, e.g. when analyzing simulation results. The implementation is serial, for now.

The api provides a more sophisticated C++ and python interface to open particle and field diagnostics, and allows full control of the original data. It’s particularly useful for debugging purposes or to write a new dataset. The data can be handled in parallel in chunks.

openPMD-api also enables seamless coupling to Pandas, DASK, RAPIDS and other frameworks.

Furthermore, consider with our 3D visualization section for openPMD support in those.