c++ gis/spatial library for higher performance computing

Question

So I am working on setting up an agent-based model that runs over a geographic map--syria in this case. I tried writing it in python, but the performance is rather slow--even after some optimization tricks. I was thinking that I should shift to just writing the model in C++, but I don't know which visualization packages can incorporate maps? I tend to use gnuplot in C++, but I have not been able to find a way to incorporate a gis basemap in that package. I am not sure if this is possible in VTK or any other packages. I would like to find a way to run my model fast in C++ but not lose the geographic information. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

So I actually figured out the answer to this problem and am posting the solution for everyone. The best choice if you are using python, is to just use the mayavi and tvtk packages from Enthought. Mayavi is a gui on top of the C++ VTK libraries. And tvtk is actually a wrapper for python access to VTK objects. So this allows a person to use python GIS packages--like pyshp, Shapely, and others to manipulate GIS objects and then write them to robust and fast mayavi for visualization. At the same time, if you want to stick to C++ then you can still just write your code in C++ using gdal or ogr, etc., and then run your visualization in VTK. This seems a lot easier and more intuitive then trying to run through some other packages like GRASS, QGIS, or ArcGIS.

Here is a good example of this toolset in action. Example

Answer 2

Perhaps this project could be useful to you ?

http://code.google.com/p/vtk-grass-bridge/

If you can handle your GIS data using GRASS, it seems that project can convert it to something VTK can render, all in one C++ application.

Answer 3

What makes you believe that a C++ implementation of your model will be dramatically faster? I suggest before being concerned with how you will visualize the results you focus first on what causes your python implementation to be slow. Is it that your algorithm won't scale? If you have tried optimization tricks, what tricks were those and why do you believe they did not work?

It all eventually comes down to machine instructions being executed on hardware, whether those instructions started out as python, C++ , or some other language source code. Unless your python was running fully interpreted all the time I don't think you will find that switching languages alone will cause you to have a fundamentally different performance profile. Premature optimization is still something to be avoided.