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Python for gamma-ray astronomy bootcamp (Feb 2017, MPIK, Heidelberg)

Summary

  • Location: MPIK Heidelberg.
  • Start: Monday, Feb 27, 2017 at 9 am
  • End: Wednesday, March 1, 2017 at 4 pm
  • Tutorial sessions end on Wednesday. On Thursday and Friday, rooms and offices as well as Gammapy and ctapipe experts are available though (see below).
  • Room:
    • Monday to Wednesday: Central seminar room in the library building #12 (see MPIK site map, ground floor, to the right)
    • Thursday / Friday: "Glaskasten" on the second floor of the Bothe lab and offices.
  • Contact: If you have a questions, or would like to join, please email Christoph Deil and Jason Watson.

About

We are organising a 3 day "bootcamp" to get people started or become better with Python, Numpy, Astropy, Gammapy, ctapipe, ... as a user or contributor.

This will be mostly an MPIK-internal workshop, but everyone is welcome to join! If you come visit, let us know if you need a recommendation for a hotel or want to stay in the MPIK guest house.

There's a wide range of existing skill levels ("never used Python" to "Gammapy or ctapipe developer"). We'll have to compromise a bit. We'll start with absolute basics on day 1, and go all the way to use Gammapy and ctapipe for some data analysis and make a first pull request with a small contribution on day 3. It'll be hands-on, with exercises. We'll roughly cover the things listed on Slide 5 here: https://github.com/gammapy/gammapy-extra/raw/master/presentations/2017-01-13_Gammapy.pdf but level and content will be adjusted to make it useful for most people based an your replies below.

There will be larger Gammapy meeting (at APC Paris the week before, see 2017-02_Paris.md) and ctapipe meetings (at MPIK) in the coming months. We also plan to have this be a kick-off bootcamp, and then start regular bi-weekly "code café" or "analysis café" where we meet for a few hours. More about that later.

Prepare

To prepare for day 1, please do the following two steps:

  1. Install software
  2. Download materials

1. Install software

Please come with your laptop and software already installed. We recommend you install Anaconda from https://www.continuum.io/downloads . Feel free to ask for help with installation in person or via email before the workshop. Or come early on day one and we'll help you get set up.

(Using a Python installation on a server (e.g. lfs1 at MPIK) is possible, but probably won't work well, because we will use Jupyter notebooks a lot, and experience shows that using them via a remote server is difficult to set up and often slow and unpleasant to use, i.e. not a good solution to get started.)

To check that your installation and setup is OK, try to exectue the following Python code:

  • print('hello world!')
  • import numpy
  • import scipy
  • import matplotlib
  • import astropy

If you get an ImportError you don't have all the software we will use.

Try to execute print('hello world') from three places:

  1. Python terminal (type python to start)
  2. IPython terminal (type ipython to start)
  3. IPython notebook (= Jupyter notebook) (type ipython notebook or jupyter notebook to start)

You can find instructions how to do the installation and how to start Python and IPython and execute your first Python code here:

2. Download materials

  • Make a directory on your computer where you'll put everything, e.g.:
    • mkdir python-tutorials
    • cd python-tutorials
  • Get the tutorial materials, i.e. the Jupyter notebooks from Jake's courses:
  • As for any Github repo, you can get it via git clone:
    • git clone https://github.com/jakevdp/WhirlwindTourOfPython.git
    • git clone https://github.com/jakevdp/PythonDataScienceHandbook.git
  • Or you can get the current version of the files as a zip file:
    • wget https://github.com/jakevdp/WhirlwindTourOfPython/archive/master.zip
    • unzip master.zip

This is all you will need for day 1.

For day 2 and 3 there will be other Python packages for you to install (Gammapy, ctapipe, ...) and tutorial materials and example datasets to download. Instructions for those will follow.

Agenda

We will develop a detailed agenda and post tutorial materials before the workshop. For now, this is a rough outline of what is planned.

The workshop will be very hands-on, basically a series of short explanations / demos followed by a small exercise.

Monday

  • We will start the Python class at 9:30 am.
  • Conference room in the library building #12 (see MPIK site map, up the stairs, to the right)
  • If you need with setup, please come already at 9:00 am.
  • See the instructions for software installation and how to download materials above in the "Prepare" section.

Morning session on "Python" (Christoph Deil):

  • Basically the plan is that we go through part of the material from "A Whirlwind Tour of Python" and do a combination of presentation, demos and exercises. Questions are welcome at any time! Let me know if I should go faster, slower or move on to something else.
  • Make sure everyone is set up (see section "Prepare" above)
  • Executing Python scripts and interactive terminal use
  • Numbers, strings, tuples, lists, dictionaries
  • Python functions (in some detail)
  • Python classes (basics)
  • Python modules, packages, import
  • Understanding Python errors / exceptions / tracebacks
  • Maybe: Reading and writing data to files (text, CSV, JSON, YAML)

Usually Python code is very intuitive and easy to understand. But we haven't really explained how Python works today. If you come from a C / C++ background, or if you take a step back and think about how Python code execution really works, some things (especially how "variables" work) might blow your mind.

If you'd like to develop a mental model of how Python works, or learn a bit how it's wired together in the background to make it work the way it does, I recommend you study the following resources:

Afternoon session on "Scientific Python" (Daniel Parsons):

Tuesday

Morning (Axel Donath):

Afternoon:

  • Short introduction to Gammapy (Axel Donath and Johannes King)
  • Short introduction to ctapipe (Jason Watson)

Wednesday

Morning:

  • Questions, extras, exercises on topics from last two days, depending on feedback from participants
  • Series of short demos of more advanced packages / topics, e.g.
    • pytest (a tutorial)
    • Sphinx (a tutorial)
    • Plotting with bokeh (Jason Watson)
    • Timing and profiling code

Afternoon:

  • From Gammapy / ctapipe user to developer:
    • Coding with PyCharm, running tests
    • Conda and pip in more detail (how does install and import work?)
    • Git and Github - https://guides.github.com/
    • Everyone makes their first pull request

Thursday and Friday

If there is interest, we can use Thursday and Friday to split up and into groups of 2-3 people and do some detailed discussions or pair coding. E.g. to help you to script your H.E.S.S. or CTA science analysis, or to work on a pull request for ctapipe or Gammapy to add some feature you want.

Thursday afternoon is a celebration for Heinz Völk.

Participants

All MPIK except where noted.