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Fastplotlib: GPU-accelerated, fast, and interactive plotting library

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Re: Fastplotlib: GPU-accelerated, fast, and interactive plotting library

#131

> powered by WGPU, a cross-platform graphics API that targets Vulkan (Linux), Metal (Mac), and DX12 (Windows). The fact that they are using WGPU, which appears to be a Python native implementation of WebGPU, suggests there is an interesting possible extended case. As a few other comments suggest, if one knows that the data is available on a machine in a cluster rather than on the local machine of a user, it might mak…

> the data is available on a machine in a cluster rather than on the local machine of a user

jupyter-rfb lets you do remote rendering for this, render to a remote frame buffer and send over a jpeg byte stream. We and a number of our scientific users use it like this. https://fastplotlib.org/ver/dev/user_guide/faq.html#what-fra...

> defining a protocol for transferring plot points

This sounds more like GSP, which Cyrille Rossant (who's made some posts here) works on, it has a slightly different kind of use case.

Re: Fastplotlib: GPU-accelerated, fast, and interactive plotting library

#132
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly why we use jupyter-rfb, I often have large datasets on a remote cluster computer and we perform remote rendering. see: https://fastplotlib.org/ver/dev/user_guide/faq.html#what-fra...

I'm in the same boat as the person you replied to, but have zero experience with remote plotting other that doing static plots in in a remote session in the interactive window provided by VS Code's python extension. Would this also work there, or would I have to start using jupyter notebooks?

non-jupyter notebook implementations have their quirks, eventually we hope to make a more universal jupyter-rfb kind of library, perhaps using anywidget. Anywidget is awesome: https://github.com/manzt/anywidget

People have used fastplotlib and jupyter-rfb in vscode, but it can be troublesome and we don't currently have the resources to figure out exactly why.

Re: Fastplotlib: GPU-accelerated, fast, and interactive plotting library

#133

> powered by WGPU, a cross-platform graphics API that targets Vulkan (Linux), Metal (Mac), and DX12 (Windows). The fact that they are using WGPU, which appears to be a Python native implementation of WebGPU, suggests there is an interesting possible extended case. As a few other comments suggest, if one knows that the data is available on a machine in a cluster rather than on the local machine of a user, it might mak…

> the data is available on a machine in a cluster rather than on the local machine of a user jupyter-rfb lets you do remote rendering for this, render to a remote frame buffer and send over a jpeg byte stream. We and a number of our scientific users use it like this. https://fastplotlib.org/ver/dev/user_guide/faq.html#what-fra... > defining a protocol for transferring plot points This sounds more like GSP, which Cyri…

What is GSP in this context? Searching Python GSP brings up Generalized Sequence Pattern (GSP) algorithm [1] and Graph Signal Processing [2], neither of which seem to be a protocol. I also found "Generic Signaling Protocol" and "Global Sequence Protocol" which also don't seem relevant. Forgive me if GSP is some well know thing which I am just not familiar with.

1. https://github.com/jacksonpradolima/gsp-py

2. https://pygsp.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

Re: Fastplotlib: GPU-accelerated, fast, and interactive plotting library

#134
post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm in the same boat as the person you replied to, but have zero experience with remote plotting other that doing static plots in in a remote session in the interactive window provided by VS Code's python extension. Would this also work there, or would I have to start using jupyter notebooks?

non-jupyter notebook implementations have their quirks, eventually we hope to make a more universal jupyter-rfb kind of library, perhaps using anywidget. Anywidget is awesome: https://github.com/manzt/anywidget People have used fastplotlib and jupyter-rfb in vscode, but it can be troublesome and we don't currently have the resources to figure out exactly why.

Alright, thanks. I don't particularly like notebook, but this might a reason to give it another go.

Re: Fastplotlib: GPU-accelerated, fast, and interactive plotting library

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the data is available on a machine in a cluster rather than on the local machine of a user jupyter-rfb lets you do remote rendering for this, render to a remote frame buffer and send over a jpeg byte stream. We and a number of our scientific users use it like this. https://fastplotlib.org/ver/dev/user_guide/faq.html#what-fra... > defining a protocol for transferring plot points This sounds more like GSP, which Cyri…

What is GSP in this context? Searching Python GSP brings up Generalized Sequence Pattern (GSP) algorithm [1] and Graph Signal Processing [2], neither of which seem to be a protocol. I also found "Generic Signaling Protocol" and "Global Sequence Protocol" which also don't seem relevant. Forgive me if GSP is some well know thing which I am just not familiar with. 1. https://github.com/jacksonpradolima/gsp-py 2. https:/…

Graphics Server Protocol

Forgive me for doing this, but I used an LLM to find that. They’re exceptionally useful for disambiguation tasks like this. Knowing what an acronym refers to is very useful for next token prediction, so they’re quite good at it. It’s usually trivial to figure out if they’re hallucinating with a search engine.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43335769

Re: Fastplotlib: GPU-accelerated, fast, and interactive plotting library

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the data is available on a machine in a cluster rather than on the local machine of a user jupyter-rfb lets you do remote rendering for this, render to a remote frame buffer and send over a jpeg byte stream. We and a number of our scientific users use it like this. https://fastplotlib.org/ver/dev/user_guide/faq.html#what-fra... > defining a protocol for transferring plot points This sounds more like GSP, which Cyri…

What is GSP in this context? Searching Python GSP brings up Generalized Sequence Pattern (GSP) algorithm [1] and Graph Signal Processing [2], neither of which seem to be a protocol. I also found "Generic Signaling Protocol" and "Global Sequence Protocol" which also don't seem relevant. Forgive me if GSP is some well know thing which I am just not familiar with. 1. https://github.com/jacksonpradolima/gsp-py 2. https:/…

I don't think it's ready yet and I think it might be private at the moment, Cyrille can comment more on it.

But if I understand correctly it's a protocol for serializing graphical objects, pretty neat idea.

Re: Fastplotlib: GPU-accelerated, fast, and interactive plotting library

#137
post #71
post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something. " https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I appreciate the warning and if it's not by claude I apologize, but I do think we should be allowed to express scepticism if things posted are just AI slop (and if we have to fear getting banned or what-have-you as a consequence I genuinely think that's worse for HN long term than the alternative).

Don't worry, we wouldn't ban anyone (just) for this. I agree with you that it's a grey area and will take time to work out.

Re: Fastplotlib: GPU-accelerated, fast, and interactive plotting library

#138
post #7

Really nice post introducing your library. When would you reach for a different library instead of fastplotlib? How does this deal with really large datasets? Are you doing any type of downsampling? How does this work with pandas? I didn't see it as a requirement in setup.py Does this work in Jupyter notebooks? What about marimo?

Thanks! > When would you reach for a different library instead of fastplotlib? Use the best tool for your usecase, we're focused on GPU accelerated interactive visualization. Our use cases broadly are developing ML algorithms, user-end ML Ops tools, and looking live data off of live scientific instruments. > How does this deal with really large datasets? Are you doing any type of downsampling? Depends on your hardwar…

Looking forward to checking out your library, thanks for sharing it with the world.

I’ve been using kst-plot for live streaming data from instruments and interactive plots. It’s fast and I haven’t found any limit for the amount of data it can plot. Development has basically stopped - the product is done, feature complete, and works perfectly! It is used by European and Canadian space agencies. Maybe it will be interesting to you to see how they have solved or approached some of the same problems you have solved or will also solve !

Re: Fastplotlib: GPU-accelerated, fast, and interactive plotting library

#139

Every two weeks or so I peruse github looking for something like this and I have to say this looks really promising. In statistical genetics we make really big scatterplots called Manhattan plots https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_plot and we have to use all this highly specialized software to visualize at different scales (for a sense of what this looks like: https://my.locuszoom.org/gwas/236887/ ). Excited to…

Have you tried ManimGL?

https://github.com/3b1b/manim/releases

Super awesome, and you can make it into an MCP for Cursor.

Re: Fastplotlib: GPU-accelerated, fast, and interactive plotting library

#140

> powered by WGPU, a cross-platform graphics API that targets Vulkan (Linux), Metal (Mac), and DX12 (Windows). The fact that they are using WGPU, which appears to be a Python native implementation of WebGPU, suggests there is an interesting possible extended case. As a few other comments suggest, if one knows that the data is available on a machine in a cluster rather than on the local machine of a user, it might mak…

What you describe sounds a bit like Graphistry:

https://pygraphistry.readthedocs.io/en/latest/performance.ht...

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