The Binary “Accelerator” Component (ShaDyLib)

Summary

Shady comes with an “accelerator”—a dynamic library that greatly improves its performance. The Shady Python package installation includes pre-built .dll files for 32-bit Windows and 64-bit Windows, a .dylib file for macOS 10.9+, and a .so file for Linux on little-endian-64-bit machines. If your platform is not supported by these included binaries, you can build the accelerator yourself, from our C++ sources.

Shady works by harnessing the graphics processor (GPU) to perform, in parallel, most of the pixel-by-pixel operations entailed in signal generation, contrast modulation, windowing, linearization and dithering. For most stimulus arrangements, this leaves relatively little for the CPU to do on each frame: it just has to issue the OpenGL commands that clear the screen and then, for each stimulus in turn, transfer a small set of variable values from CPU to GPU. Nonetheless this may amount to a few hundred separate operations per frame—we’ll call these the “CPU housekeeping” operations (and we’ll consider them separate from the optional further computations that can be performed between frames to animate stimuli).

The CPU housekeeping is performed by an “engine”. The earliest versions of Shady implemented the engine in pure Python. Some of the time, this worked fine, but it was prone to sporadic frame skips. So we transitioned to using the “accelerator”, which is a binary engine compiled from C++ and packaged as a dynamic library called ShaDyLib. Some binary builds of ShaDyLib are included with the Shady Python package: dll files for 32- and 64-bit Windows, a dylib file for 64-bit macOS 10.9 (Mavericks, 2013) and up, and a so file for Linux running on little-endian 64-bit systems (compiled on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS for Desktops). These are used by default where possible. To make the corresponding so or dylib file for other systems, you would need to build it yourself from the C++ sources (see below).

The pure-Python engine is still included (as the Shady.PyEngine submodule) and it is used automatically as a fallback when the accelerator is not available. But it is much better to use the accelerator (and to attempt to compile the accelerator from source if the dynamic library for your platform is not already part of Shady). The problem is that Python, being a high-level dynamic interpreted language, is inefficient for performing large numbers of simple operations. Relative to the equivalent operations compiled from C++, Python not only requires extra time but, critically, adds a large amount of variability to the time taken when running on a modern operating system that tends to perform a lot of sporadic background tasks (the effect of these is especially noticeable on Windows). Hence the frequent sporadic frame skips when using the PyEngine, which become much rarer when you use the accelerator.

Windowing and Rendering

These are two separate issues:

Windowing

is about creating a window and an associated OpenGL context, synchronizing the double-buffer flipping with the display hardware’s frame updates, and handling events such as keyboard and mouse input.

Rendering

is about the OpenGL calls that comprise most of the frame-by-frame CPU housekeeping. Rendering is implemented in a windowing-independent way (i.e. without reference to the windowing environment or its particular implementation).

The ShaDyLib accelerator provides independent implementations of both windowing (using a modified GLFW C library) and rendering. Assuming you have the accelerator, you have three options:

  1. Use the accelerator for both windowing and rendering. When the accelerator is available, this is the default option, and is highly recommended for performance reasons.

  2. Use a different windowing environment (such as pyglet) and still use the accelerator for rendering. There is no great advantage to doing this, and there are disadvantages here and there (e.g. failure to take full advantage of Mac Retina screen resolution).

  3. Do not use the accelerator at all. Fall back to the PyEngine, which requires a third-party package to expose the necessary OpenGL calls. Either pyglet or PyOpenGL will work for this (pyglet is probably the better choice because, in the absence of the accelerator, you will also need it for windowing anyway). As explained above, this option is not recommended if you can avoid it.

The BackEnd() function allows you to change the default windowing and rendering implementations.

Building the Accelerator from Source

As we mentioned above, binaries are included in the Shady download, for 32-bit Windows, and for 64-bit Windows, macOS and Linux. Therefore, we hope you will not need to build the accelerator from source. However, if you need to do so for any reason (for example to support other operating systems or operating- system versions, provided they’re running on little-endian hardware) then it should be relatively easy. (“Should” is every engineer’s most heavily loaded word.)

You can obtain the complete Shady source code from the master git repository which is hosted on Bitbucket:

git clone https://bitbucket.org/snapproject/shady-gitrepo

Or you can go to that URL with a browser and clickety-clickety-download-unzippety if you really must. But there are several advantages to installing git and then managing things with the git command from within the shady-gitrepo directory. For example, it makes it very easy to get our latest updates:

git pull

or to switch between bleeding-edge code:

git checkout master && git merge

and the latest released version:

git checkout origin/release --track    # the first time you switch to `release`

git checkout release && git merge      # subsequent times

Your working-copy of the repository will include a copy of the Shady package itself, inside the python subdirectory. You can “install” this copy as your default Shady package if you want: first change your working directory so that you’re in the root of the working-copy (i.e. the place that contains setup.py) and then call:

python -m pip install -e .

The -e flag stands for “editable copy” and this type of “installation” does not actually copy or move any files. Instead, it merely causes whichever Python distribution you just invoked to make a permanent record of the location of the appropriate directory, thereby ensuring that it is found when you say import Shady in subsequent sessions.

Your working-copy of the repository will also include the accel-src directory tree which contains the C++ sources for the accelerator. To build these, you need to have CMake installed (version 3.7+) as well as a C++ compiler. On Windows, the compiler we use is Visual C++, installed as part of a free (“Express” or “Community”) edition of Visual Studio 2012 or later. On macOS, we use gcc installed from the “XCode Command Line Tools” package (we don’t need the full-blown XCode).

The script accel-src/devel/build/go.cmd can be run from a Windows Command Prompt or from a bash command-line (e.g. from the “Terminal” app on macOS) and will run the entire CMake + build process. If you’re on Windows, and either your OS or your Python distribution is 32-bit, then you need to explicitly say go.cmd Win32. Further details are provided in the comments at the top of the go.cmd script.

The accelerator has two third-party depenencies: GLEW and GLFW. GLEW is provided as source. Binary builds of GLFW (slightly modified) are also provided in the repository. If for any reason you need to rebuild that GLFW library, see the instructions in accel-src/devel/glfw/build-notes.txt

On Linux, we also found it necessary to install various developer tools, libraries and headers. Here is our script for setting up our development environment for Shady, on the basis of a fresh installation of Ubuntu 18.x LTS for Desktops:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install \
    mercurial git cmake g++                                                   `# essentials for versioning Shady and building ShaDyLib`\
    libglu1-mesa-dev libxrandr-dev libxi-dev libxcursor-dev libxinerama-dev   `# libraries required for building ShaDyLib`\
    curl libudev-dev libtool autotools-dev automake pkg-config                `# build tools and libraries required for libusb build (part of dpxmode build)`\
    python-pip  python-tk                                                     `# Python 2 basics`\
    python3-pip python3-tk                                                    `# Python 3 basics`\
;
sudo pip  install numpy matplotlib ipython pillow opencv-python pyglet pyserial   # Python 2 third-party packages
sudo pip3 install numpy matplotlib ipython pillow opencv-python pyglet pyserial   # Python 3 third-party packages

# get Shady
mkdir -p ~/code
cd ~/code
git clone https://bitbucket.org/snapproject/shady-gitrepo
cd shady-gitrepo

# "install" Shady as an editable package
sudo pip  install -e .
sudo pip3 install -e .

# build the accelerator
./accel-src/devel/build/go.cmd

# build and incorporate the mode-changer utility for the ViewPixx monitor
./dpxmode-src/build.cmd
./dpxmode-src/release.cmd

# In addition, to use Shady on the primary screen, we had to auto-hide the
# Ubuntu dock (Applications -> Settings -> Dock -> Auto-hide the Dock) and
# and the top bar (search for and install the "Hide Top Bar" extension)

A successfully built shared library will end up in the accel-src/release/ directory. What do you do with it then? Well:

  • If you are using the repository copy of the Shady Python package (i.e. you have performed python -m pip install -e . as described above, or you are working in the python directory next-door to accel-src when you start Python) then Shady will be smart enough, by default, to look for the accelerator in ../accel-src/release/ and to prefer it over any copy that it finds “bundled” in its own package directory. You can also explicitly control which version it prefers, by supplying either acceleration='devel' or acceleration='bundled' as a keyword argument, either to Shady.BackEnd() or to the Shady.World() constructor.

  • You can verify which version of the accelerator is being loaded by looking under ShaDyLib in the output of the ReportVersions() method of an instantiated World, or failing that the global Shady.ReportVersions() function.

  • Finally, maybe you would like to move the newly-built shared library into the “bundled” location within the accompanying Shady package directory? If so, you can run python accel-src/devel/build/release.cmd. This will copy all the relevant material from accel-src/release/ into the python/Shady/accel subdirectory, and remove the dynamic libraries from accel-src/release/.