[Axiom-developer] Graphing the algebra lattice: some progress with Tulip

[David MENTRE]

Hello,

A looong time ago, we wanted to graph Axiom algebra lattice. Martin
RUBEY proposed to use Tulip[1]. I have given it a try.

What I have done:

 1. start from src/algebra/Lattice.pamphlet;

 2. produce a Lattice.txt with only depency information;

 3. use a small Perl script (txt2tlp.pl) to transform this text file
    into a native Tulip file (.tlp file);

 4. load the graph into Tulip (1015 nodes, 7720 edges), play with Tulip
    and try to understand its user interface. :)


The good news: Tulip is able to handle graphs of that size. The bad
news: right now, I don't found the produced graph of any usefulness. But
there are some many combinations that I'm a bit lost. And the
documentation seems not up-to-date and a bit light. Somebody else might
produce a more useful output.

I don't plan to do more work on this in the short term, so you'll find
at below URL the source and produced files. I've included the file
"img/lattice-gem3d.eps.bz2" which is a bzip2-ed EPS file containing an
image of a produced graph. If you want to load a file into Tulip, give a
try to "lattice-gem3d.tlp".

  http://www.linux-france.org/~dmentre/code/axiom/lattice.tar.gz


I've used Tulip 1.2.5 of Debian unstable.


Some remarks for further work: 

 1. as it was pointed out before, it might be preferable to parse the
    compilation log to extract more up-to-date dependency information.
    And as pointed out by Juergen[2], some dependencies are not printed
    by default so an image without preloads should be used (I don't know
    how to do that);

 2. while the layering information is available in the Lattice.txt file,
    this layering is not used to produce Tulip graph clusters by my
    small perl script. It might help to make the produced graphs more
    readable.


Yours,
d.

[1] http://mail.nongnu.org/archive/html/axiom-developer/2003-08/msg00101.html
[2] http://mail.nongnu.org/archive/html/axiom-developer/2003-08/msg00097.html
-- 
David MENTRE <address@hidden> -- http://www.nongnu.org/axiom/