Welcome to SWIFTsimIO’s documentation!
swiftsimio is a toolkit for reading data produced by the SWIFT
astrophysics simulation code. It is used to ensure that all data have a
symbolic unit attached, and can be used for visualisation. Another key
feature is the use of the cell metadata in SWIFT snapshots to enable
efficient reading of sub-regions.
The SWIFT astrophysical simulation code is used widely. There exists
many ways of reading the data from SWIFT, which outputs HDF5 files.
These range from reading directly using h5py to using a complex
system such as yt; however these either are unsatisfactory
(e.g. a lack of unit information in reading HDF5), or too complex for
most use-cases. swiftsimio provides an object-oriented API to
dynamically read data from SWIFT outputs, including FOF and SOAP
catalogues. An extension module for swiftsimio for using
catalogues and snapshots in tandem is available: swiftgalaxy.
Getting set up with swiftsimio is easy; it (by design) has very few
requirements. There are a number of optional packages that you can install
to make the experience better and these are recommended.