How Many Stars Are There in The Universe?
The Universe is the fundamental data structure of MDAnalysis. It contains all the topology and trajectory data of a simulation system. Normally, a Universe can be created from files:
universe = mda.Universe(topology, trajectory)
where topology must be specified to access ‘atom’-wise information of the system; trajectory , on the other hand, can be either loaded from a trajectory file, deduced from topology (e.g. when it is a pdb file), or absent at all. If in_memory = True , the trajectory will be loaded directly into memory with MemoryReader, while in default, it will be parsed as a corresponding reader for different types of trajectories.
Let’s have a look at the stars in a Universe after it is created.
>>> u = mda.Universe(GRO, XTC)
>>> print(u.__dict__)
{'_cache': {},
'_anchor_name': None,
'_anchor_uuid': UUID('a1b4e353-aeaf-4830-8de7-cadadcfc35da'),
'atoms': <AtomGroup with 47681 atoms>,
'residues': <ResidueGroup with 11302 residues>,
'segments': <SegmentGroup with 1 segment>,
'filename': 'data/adk_oplsaa.gro',
'_kwargs': {'transformations': None,
'guess_bonds': False,
'vdwradii': None,
'anchor_name': None,
'is_anchor': True,
'in_memory': False,
'in_memory_step': 1,
'format': None,
'topology_format': None,
'all_coordinates': False},
'_topology': <MDAnalysis.core.topology.Topology at 0x7febf011a690>,
'_class_bases': {MDAnalysis.core.groups.GroupBase: MDAnalysis.core.
groups._TopologyAttrContainer,
MDAnalysis.core.groups.AtomGroup: MDAnalysis.core.groups.
_TopologyAttrContainer,
MDAnalysis.core.groups.ResidueGroup: MDAnalysis.core.groups.
_TopologyAttrContainer,
MDAnalysis.core.groups.SegmentGroup: MDAnalysis.core.groups.
_TopologyAttrContainer,
MDAnalysis.core.groups.ComponentBase: MDAnalysis.core.groups.
_TopologyAttrContainer,
MDAnalysis.core.groups.Atom: MDAnalysis.core.groups._TopologyAttrContainer,
MDAnalysis.core.groups.Residue: MDAnalysis.core.groups._TopologyAttrContainer,
MDAnalysis.core.groups.Segment: MDAnalysis.core.groups._TopologyAttrContainer},
'_classes': {MDAnalysis.core.groups.AtomGroup:
MDAnalysis.core.groups.AtomGroup,
MDAnalysis.core.groups.ResidueGroup: MDAnalysis.core.groups.ResidueGroup,
MDAnalysis.core.groups.SegmentGroup: MDAnalysis.core.groups.SegmentGroup,
MDAnalysis.core.groups.Atom: MDAnalysis.core.groups.Atom,
MDAnalysis.core.groups.Residue: MDAnalysis.core.groups.Residue,
MDAnalysis.core.groups.Segment: MDAnalysis.core.groups.Segment},
'_trajectory': <XTCReader data/adk_oplsaa.xtc with 10 frames of 47681 atoms>}
__dict__ is an important attribute in terms of pickling. As we will cover more in the following parallelism blog, an object in python has to be pickled/unpickled when it is transferred across different threads. In default, some normal data types can be easily pickled (or serialized), e.g. integers, strings, lists, etc.; while for user-defined classes, instances of such classes whose __dict__ or the result of calling __getstate__() has to be picklable can be pickled.
So, what’s the current status of the picklibility of a Universe ?
>>> for star in u.__dict__:
>>> try:
>>> pickle.dumps(u.__dict__[star])
>>> print('{:20} can be pickled'.format(star))
>>> except:
>>> print('{:20} cannot be pickled'.format(star))
_cache can be pickled
_anchor_name can be pickled
_anchor_uuid can be pickled
atoms can be pickled
residues cannot be pickled
segments cannot be pickled
filename can be pickled
_kwargs can be pickled
_topology can be pickled
_class_bases cannot be pickled
_classes cannot be pickled
_trajectory can be pickled
Looks not bad, huh? We just need to fix a few attributes—if they are fixable—to make Universe pickable, but do we really need all these class attributes? In fact, upon pickling, a special function __reduce__ is being called to declare how an object should be pickled. For our Universe, topology and trajectory might be quite enough for the reconstruction of the same Universe. Another caveat is that not all the trajectory readers can be pickled in default:
Overall, in this project, I will implement the pickling support to create a parallel Universe with the same stars, well, for parallel analysis.