This is the home page for the Pizza.py toolkit written in the Python scripting language.

Pizza.py is a loosely integrated collection of tools, many of which provide pre- and post-processing capability for the LAMMPS molecular dynamics, ChemCell cell modeling, and SPPARKS kinetic Monte Carlo packages. There are tools to create input files, convert between file formats, process log and dump files, create plots, and visualize and animate simulation snapshots. Software packages that are wrapped by Pizza.py, so they can be invoked from Python, include GnuPlot, MatLab, Raster3d, RasMol, and VMD.

The name Pizza.py is meant to evoke the aroma of a collection of "toppings" that the user can combine in different ways on a "crust" of basic functionality, with Python as the "cheese" that glues everything together.

Pizza.py is distributed as an open source code under the terms of the GPL license and can be downloaded from this site.

Pizza.py runs on any machine with Python installed. Pizza.py enhances the standard Python interpreter in a few simple ways. It's tools are Python modules which can be invoked interactively, from scripts, or from GUIs when appropriate. Some of the tools require additional Python packages to be installed as part of your Python. Others are wrappers on software packages (e.g. GnuPlot) which must be available on your system. If you don't have these add-ons or don't want to use a particular tool, you don't have to load it when Pizza.py starts up. It's easy to modify or extend Pizza.py with new functionality or new tools, which need not have anything to do with LAMMPS or ChemCell.

The chief author of Pizza.py is Steve Plimpton who can be contacted at sjplimp at sandia.gov. Pizza.py is distributed by Sandia National Laboratories, a US Department of Energy (DOE) laboratory. Many of the tools were written by Matt Jones, a BYU student who spent a summer at Sandia. Funding for Pizza.py development has come from the DOE and is acknowledged here.

The Pizza.py WWW site is hosted by Sandia, which has this Privacy and Security statement.

• (6/14) New sdata tool for reading, creating, writing surface files for the SPARTA Direct Simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC) code.
• (11/10) New vmd tool that is a wrapper on the popular "VMD visualization package", so that it can be driven by Python and display LAMMPS snapshots in real time.
• (4/07) New mdump tool that reads in mesh files and their associated nodal or element values for viz by other Pizza.py tools or for output to Ensight format.
• (4/07) New cfg tool that converts LAMMPS data/dump files to the CFG format used by the AtomEye visualization package. Thanks to Aidan Thompson (Sandia).
• (10/06) New ensight tool that converts LAMMPS data/dump files to the format used by the Ensight visualization/animation packge.
• (10/06) Release of 1 Oct 2006 version with new clog and cdata tools for ChemCell pre- and post-processing, a histo tool, and various other bug fixes and minor upgrades.
• (11/05) Release of 7 Nov 2005 version with 3d interactive visualization via OpenGL and a VCR-style GUI (see the gl and vcr tools). The OpenGL capability was added to Pizza.py thru the Python PyOpenGL package.
• (10/05) Creation of a Pizza.py mailing list on SourceForge for posting questions about Pizza.py and browsing past questions/answers in the archive. The new SourceForge project page for Pizza.py also allows for downloads of the Pizza.py package. Here are instructions on various ways the Pizza.py mailing list can be used.

Screenshot of several Pizza.py tools in action. Click on the small image for a larger version.