Introducing Galry, a high-performance interactive 2D visualization Python package

I'm releasing today the code of a first experimental version of Galry, a high-performance interactive 2D visualization Python package that I'm creating as part of my current research project.

The rationale of this package is to provide a highly flexible and optimized way of visualizing large 2D datasets in Python by using the full power of the graphics card. Most visualization packages in Python are either meant to generate high-quality publication-ready figures (like matplotlib), or to offer 3D fast interactive visualization (like mayavi). Existing 2D plotting packages do not generally offer an efficient way to interactively visualize large datasets (1, 10, even 100 million points). That's what Galry is aiming for, by using directly OpenGL through a thin Python wrapper called PyOpenGL. Galry should work on most platforms (Windows/MacOS/Linux).

To give an idea of the performance of Galry on a recent hardware, on a 2012 desktop computer with an high-end AMD graphics card, I can navigate smoothly into a plot with 50 million points (~35 FPS in the current version), and almost smoothly with 100 million points (~15 FPS).

Galry integrates smoothly with IPython and Qt, through either PyQt or PySide.

Demo

Getting started

The code is available on GitHub.

Important note: Galry is still an experimental project with an unstable programming interface that is likely to change at any time. Do not use it in production yet.

Installation of Galry may not be straightforward depending on your specific configuration. In particular, you need a recent enough version of OpenGL (tested version: 3.3). Please don't hesitate to contact me if you have any trouble installing or using the library.