I just watched the “Organizing Your Data” webinar by Mark Piper of ITT VIS. It provides an excellent overview to your options for storing data in memory, comparing arrays and structures to the new IDL 8.0 lists and hashes.
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I'm a software developer focusing on high-performance computing and visualization in scientific programming. I work mostly in IDL, but occasionally use C, CUDA, and Python.
I currently work for the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) at the Mauna Loa Solar Observatory. Previously, I worked for Tech-X Corporation, where I was the main developer for GPULib, a library of IDL bindings for GPU accelerated computation routines.
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GPULib enables IDL developers to access the high-performance capabilities of modern NVIDIA graphics cards without knowledge of CUDA programming.
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mpiDL is a library of IDL bindings for Message Passing Interface (MPI) used for tightly-coupled parallel applications.
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Modern IDL offers IDL programmers one place to look, for beginners and advanced users alike. This book also contains: a thorough tutorial on the core topics of IDL; a comprehensive introduction to the object graphics system; common problems and gotchas with many examples; advanced topics not normally found are discussed throughout the book: regular expressions, object graphics, advanced widget programming, performance, object-oriented programming, etc.
IDLdoc is an open source utility for generating documentation from IDL source code and specially formatted comments.
mgunit is an open source unit testing framework for IDL.
rIDL is an open source IDL command line replacement.
mglib is an open source library of IDL routines in areas of visualization, application development, command line utilities, analysis, data access, etc.
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November 23rd, 2010 at 12:04 pm
I found the (simple) time test on building a storage area (of unknown length) between the array, structures, hash, and list very interesting. With all the talk about the greatness of hash and list, it seems the old fashion methods of using array and structure to store data beats the new fangle storage methods.
Thanks for an interesting webinar Mark! I hope to see more.
Kelly
November 23rd, 2010 at 12:56 pm
Yes, I think of arrays and structures as “primitives” that are fairly efficient, but lacking flexibility and extra features. Use them when you can, but now there are new features in the form of lists and hashes that you can use if you need them.
What I’m still wondering is whether things like my MGcoArrayList still have a place somewhere? It’s an object which uses an array to store the data, but handles the bookkeeping of resizing the array as required. It has a mix of the pros/cons of both arrays and lists.
November 28th, 2010 at 7:10 pm
Thanks, Kelly! If you have ideas for webinar topics, please send them to me.