CosmoSim is a simulator for gravitational lensing.
The CosmoSim class provides the core interface to
manage simulations. There are two classes of the same
name; a parent class written in C++ and a derived class
written in Python.
The Python wrappers are designed to support both the GUI and the batch generation. The GUI requires interactive parameter tuning and real time responsiveness. It is not necessarily ideal to use the same structure for both GUI and batch, but in the early prototyping stages, we did not have the capacity to maintain two separate strains.
Originally, only one class was wrapped for Python, CosmoSim.
This was simply to avoid all the plumbing code for the bindigs,
but as the configuration options increased, this became cumbersome.
When multiple sources and cluster lenses were introduced, these would
be constructed from the python code, requiring bindings also for Lens
and Source classes.
The current separation of responsibilities between Python and C++ is inconsistent, and more code should be moved from C++ to Python. This is work in progress.
This thread and event model is created to allow interactive parameter changes while the simulator is running. The model makes sure that only one call to run the simulator is made at the time, and that it is rerun if the parameters has changed while running.
The CosmoSim object defines the following
updateEventsimEventsimThreadThe simThread (thread and function) loops. waiting for a simEvent
to
runSim()) in the C++ code).updateEvent to trigger update of the GUI.To avoid race conditions, it is critical that runSim() is only
ever run from the simThread. To call the simulator, the
runSimulator() method should be used instead. This function
simply sets the simEvent.
There is a thin python wrapper to the runSim() method. All it does
is to snapshot the source model as an attribute, to prevent it from
being garbage collected while the simulator is running.