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Google Summer of Code 2021

Google Summer of Code with
MDAnalysis 2021

MDAnalysis has been accepted as an organization into Google Summer of Code 2021! If you are a student who is interested in working with us this summer, please read the advice and links below and write to us on the mailing list.

We are looking forward to all applications from interested students (undergraduate and postgraduate).

The application window deadline is April 13, 2021 11:00 (Mountain Standard Time). As part of the application process you must familiarize yourself with Google Summer of Code 2021.

If you are interested in working with us please read on and contact us on our mailing list. Apply as soon as possible; the application window opens on March 29, 2021.

Project Ideas

If you have your own idea about a potential project we’d love to work with you to develop this idea; please write to us on the developer list to discuss it there.

We also have listed several possible projects for you to work on, on our wiki. Our initial list of ideas (see summaries in the table below) contains 6 projects at different levels of difficulties and with different skill requirements. However, check the ideas page — we might add more ideas after the posting date of this post.

You don’t need to have all the skills that we are listing, although that helps, of course. But you need to demonstrate to us that you’re able and keen to learn anything that you don’t know yet, and we will be happy to help you learn during your project with us.

project name difficulty description skills mentors
1 Molecular volume and surface analysis easy use an existing package for molecular surface area calculations to build a new analysis module Python, MDAnalysis.analysis @orbeckst, @IAlibay, @hmacdope
2 Generalise Groups medium Generalise concept of groups Python @lilyminium, @fiona-naughton, @richardjgowers, @IAlibay
3 Cythonisation of AtomGroup easy Cythonise AtomGroup for use with C/++ Python, Cython, C/++ @richardjgowers, @hmacdope
4 Extend MDAnalysis Interoperability medium Extend converters module to other relevant packages Python @lilyminium, @IAlibay, @fiona-naughton, @hmacdope
5 General unit cell representation easy change unit cell representation to keep track of box rotations and so improve analysis of simulations under periodic boundary conditions Python @orbeckst, @fiona-naughton

Information for Students

You must meet our own requirements if you want to be a student with MDAnalysis this year (read all the docs behind these links!). You must also meet the eligibility criteria. Our GSoC FAQ collects common questions from students.

The MDAnalysis community values diversity and is committed to providing a productive, harassment-free to every member. Our Code of Conduct explains the values that we as a community uphold. Every member (and every GSoC student) agrees to follow the Code of Conduct.

As a start to get familiar with MDAnalysis and open source development you should follow these steps:

Complete the Quick Start Guide

We have a Quick Start Guide explaining the basics of MDAnalysis. You should go through it at least once to understand how MDAnalysis is used. Continue reading the User Guide to learn more.

Introduce yourself to us

Introduce yourself on the mailing list. Tell us what you plan to work on during the summer or what you have already done with MDAnalysis.

Close an issue of MDAnalysis

You must have at least one commit in the development branch of MDAnalysis in order to be eligible, i.e. you must demonstrate that you have been seriously engaged with the MDAnalysis project. We have a list of easy bugs and suggested GSOC Starter issues to work on in our issue tracker on GitHub. We also appreciate if you write more tests or update/improve our documentation.

We recommend you start your application by working on an issue. It will give you a better understanding of MDAnalysis as a project and improve the quality of your application.

To start developing for MDAnalysis have a look at our guide on contributing to MDAnalysis and write to us on the mailing list if you have more questions about setting up a development environment or how to contribute.

@IAlibay, @orbeckst, @richardjgowers, @fiona-naughton, @hmacdope, @lilyminium

GSoC 2020 wrap-up

Google Summer of Code 2020

Google Summer of Code 2020 wrapped up! It was a very successful GSoC Summer for MDAnalysis with three great projects. Even more importantly, we got to engage with three outstanding students: Hugo MacDermott-Opeskin, Yuxuan Zhuang, and Cédric Bouysset.

You can read more about their projects in their blog posts:

Finally, a big thank-you to our GSoC mentors: @IAlibay, @acpmnv, @fiona-naughton. Their constant and enthusiastic engagement was crucial to the success of our students.

— Org Admins (@richardjgowers, @kain88-de, @orbeckst)

GSoC Report: Trajectory New Generation: the trajectory format for the future of simulation

This is the end?

Well well well, here we are at the end of GSoC! What a ride it has been, giving me a chance to improve my skills and contribute in ways I never thought would be possible. Thanks to all my mentors @acpmnv (Paul), @orbeckst (Oliver) and @richardjgowers (Richard) for all the help and guidance throughout.

Why TNG?

Trajectory storage has proved problematic for the molecular simulation community, due to large file sizes, poor portability and low metadata incorporation. As hardware and software advances enable the creation of larger and more complex datasets, shortcomings in trajectory formats have been highlighted. The Trajectory New Generation (or TNG) format 1,2 designed by GROMACS aims to remove these shortcomings, enabling flexible compression, metadata incorporation small file sizes combined with a lightweight API.

Despite its many advantages, the TNG format has not seen widespread adoption, as tooling to support the format is lacking. Creation of new TNG tooling has been hindered by the current design and implementation of the TNG library in older style C code. My project centered around improving implementation and tooling for the TNG format. Our primary aims were two fold, with the first half of my project working on converting the original library to C++ and the second half on developing some Python bindings so that the format can be read into MDAnalysis.

TNG time!

I started GSoC working on the TNG library with the aim of adding tests, understanding the API and converting the older C style API it to C++. I worked on this for the majority of the bonding period as well as the first and some of the second coding period.

First I added tests in !3 which then revealed problems in the base API that were fixed in !6, !12 and !17. I then made these additional tests into a formal test suite employing GoogleTest in !16, !20 and !21. This revealed some more API elements that could be improved which were touched up in !22, !23 and !25.

Using GoogleTest, a typical regression test looked a lot like this:

TEST_F(ArgonCompressedTest, BoxShapeValues)
{
    int64_t             stride_length, i;
    tng_function_status read_stat;
    read_stat = tng_util_box_shape_read(traj, &box_shape, &stride_length);
    EXPECT_EQ(read_stat, TNG_SUCCESS);
    // box_shape frame 0
    const std::vector<float> frame_0  = {
        3.60140, 0.00000, 0.000000, 0.000000, 3.60140, 0.000000, 0.000000, 0.000000, 3.60140,
    };
    ASSERT_EQ(frame_0.size(), 9);
    // compare element by element
    for (i = 0; i < 9; i++)
    {
        EXPECT_FLOAT_EQ(box_shape[i], frame_0[i]);
    }

}

Now you can just make test to ensure your TNG times will be fun times!

Once we had a test suite that could be used to check library correctness on the major routines we started to work on the TNG library itself. Key goals were C++ compilation and in turn modernisation of the library routines to modern C++. I achieved full C++ compilation in a combination of !26, !27, !29, !33 and !34.

Moving the project to C++ appeared simple at the top level:

set_source_properties(SOURCE ... LANGUAGES CXX)

Where all .c files should be renamed to .cpp (primarily so clang will read them as C++ correctly). Then the hard part! Non ISO C then had to be made ISO C++. An example of this is given below:

void DECLSPECDLLEXPORT* Ptngc_warnmalloc_x(size_t size, char* file, int line);
#define warnmalloc(size) Ptngc_warnmalloc_x(size, __FILE__, __LINE__)

Use of this macro performs a void to T implicit cast which has deprecated in C++ as being unsafe. In C++ this requires an explicit cast with static_cast<T>():

//explicitly cast
unsigned int*  dict = static_cast<unsigned int*>(warnmalloc(0x20004 * sizeof *dict));

Also important, although technically ISO compliant, was turning C style casts into explicit (explicitly ugly) C++ casts:

//this
md5_append(md5_state, (md5_byte_t*)str, len);
// to this (wow disgusting)
md5_append(md5_state, reinterpret_cast<md5_byte_t*>(const_cast<char*>(str)), len);

There were loads and loads of these throughout the library, which hopefully look a lot more like C++ now.

From here I started on modernisation of the library classes and constructs to modern C++. These progressed in !28 which outlined the structure we were aiming for, !32 which defined a specific API for blocks, !35 that updated the trajectory API and !36 which progressed on the IO elements.

An example of a modernisation change to the TNG API involves the use of templates to simplify the definition of TNG data blocks. A complicated struct that carried around a void* array for the data and a tng_datatypes enum to indicate the data type contained in the block could instead be a templated class as is shown below:

template<typename T> // type for data array
TngDataBlock<T>::TngDataBlock(const int64_t&     id,
                            // other stuff
                              T*                 values) :

Template specialization is then used to do the correct operations for each datatype, reducing a lot of very repetitive code paths into a few simpler statements.

Refactoring the TNG library was a huge task, much more so than initially anticipated. Due to this and some changing circumstances, the aforementioned modernisation MRs are all still open with more work required. I plan on working on these into the future but progress will be slow as I do not have solid blocks of time to dedicate.

All the work I have done on TNG itself can be found in my TNG fork as well as open PRs on the TNG library itself.

PyTNG time!

From here I switched focus to PyTNG, a set of Python bindings designed for use by MDAnalysis although technically a separate library. I worked on PyTNG for most of the second half of GSoC. This required changing gears a little bit as well as learning Cython, which was initially a bit of a learning curve for me.

Firstly I changed the TNG libraries exported with PyTNG itself to include the bugfixes obtained as part of the earlier improvements to the TNG library. This was incorporated as part of #28. I then improved the TNG library calls in PyTNG in #29.

Following some design discussions, we then moved towards a newer design for the bindings, so as to be able to read all the blocks available in a TNG file with maximal speed. This was achieved in merging #32 and ongoing work in #38, which are a total redesign of the whole PyTNG API.

The end result of this is a working implementation that can read any TNG block as of #32 with improvements close in #38. I also added docs and examples as part of #38. Profiling and timings indicated high performance of the bindings, with the library largely IO bound at the TNG API (pure C) level.

An example of how to use PyTNG to read a TNG file and extract positions is shown below:


   import pytng
   import numpy as np

   with pytng.TNGFileIterator("traj.tng", 'r') as tng:

      # make a numpy array to hold the data using helper function
      # this array will then be updated in-place 
      
      positions = tng.make_ndarray_for_block_from_name("TNG_TRAJ_POSITIONS")
      
      # the TNG API uses regular strides for data deposition,
      # here we stride over the whole trajectory for the
      # frames that have position data
      # where len(tng) is the total number of steps in the file.

      for ts in tng[0:len(tng):tng.block_strides["TNG_TRAJ_POSITIONS"]):
         # read the integrator timestep
         # then, get the data from the requested block by
         # supplying NumPy array which is updated in-place
         ts.get_pos(positions)

What can we do now?

  • The TNG library now has a regression-test suite
  • The TNG library can be compiled as C++ 14 with a modern compiler.
  • The groundwork is also laid for further improvements of the library.
  • PyTNG has a (larger) regression-test suite
  • PyTNG is now a set of (more) functional bindings for the TNG format that can read any TNG block!

Looking forward

I plan on extending PyTNG to TNG writing as well as integrating PyTNG into MDAnalysis following GSoC. I have raised issues in PyTNG to make sure things that still need to be completed are apparent to people following on. I also aim to keep working on TNG itself time permitting.

What have I learnt?

Things I have learned in GSoC include

  • C++ class design
  • C++ for binary IO
  • CMake, GoogleTest and how to refactor a large codebase
  • Cython and Python/C integration
  • Working collaboratively on a diverse global team

My experience

GSoC was a fantastic experience for me, as I felt very welcome amongst two communities (MDAnalysis and GROMACS). I hope I was able to give back! I was constantly challenged throughout and this helped me learn and grow with big improvements both in my technical skills and approach to computational problem solving.

Thanks all for having me along!

@hmacdope