From managing the creation of analyses, monitoring them as they run, and handling the post-processing of results, Asimov has your back while improving the reliability and reproducability of analyses.
$ pip install asimov
Latest release: 0.6.0
Asimov began life as a project for managing very large analyses from gravitational wave searches, but it's just as happy working on small projects.
Get started by following the installation documentation.
$ pip install asimov
$ conda install -c conda-forge asimov
Get started on your own gravitational wave analysis by following the getting started guide.
We often want to run multiple analyses on the same data with just a few settings changed.
Asimov makes this easy, and makes sure that the analyses are internally consistent, thanks to its analysis blueprints feature.
Analysis sets can be saved and applied to multiple subjects, for example, the entire set of analyses required to reproduce a GWTC catalogue analysis can be applied to an event with a single command.
kind: analysis name: get-data pipeline: gwdata download: - frames --- kind: analysis name: noise-analysis pipeline: bayeswave needs: get-data --- kind: analysis name: main-analysis pipeline: bilby needs: noise-analysis
Asimov works with the htcondor scheduling system to keep track of your analyses.
It can produce web-pages with details of all your analyses so that they can easily be checked on the go.
Asimov will attempt to fix and restart pipelines which have stopped running, or alert you if it's not able to fix the problem.
$ asimov monitor
Asimov allows you to hook-up your own analysis pipeline with just a small amount of code, allowing you to take advantage of its powerful automation features.
Visit the pipeline development guide to learn how to make your analysis work with asimov.
25 Aug 2025
Today we’re announcing that we’ve more-than-doubled the number of black hole collisions which we’ve observed using gravitational waves. We’re also releasing an enormous amount of data collected between May 2023 and January 2024 which measures tiny changes in the Universe’s geometry measured by gravitational-wave detectors, which are how we identify these collisions. We collect the information about these collisions into publications which we call a “catalog”, which contain all of the information we’re able to extract from the signals we detect and interpret. This includes things like the mass of the objects which were colliding, how fast they were spinning, and whereabouts in the Universe they were. We’ve published earlier versions of this catalogue before now: GWTC-1.0 has events from the first two observing-runs, GWTC-2.0 adds events from the first part of the third observing-run, and GWTC-3.0 events from the second part of that run. GWTC-4.0, which we’ve released today on the arXiv, is the latest version, analysing the first part of our fourth observing run (O4a). The amount of information in these has become so large that we now split the publication describing the catalog into three parts: an introduction paper, a paper describing the methods used in the analyses, and the results of those analyses. I’ve had the pleasure of leading a team which performed one of these analyses (the “parameter estimation” analysis), which takes signals which have been identified in the data and then works out the properties of the black holes and neutron stars which produced them. It took around 60 of us to do this (and there’s more about that later in this post). I then took-over as the editor of the results part of the catalog publication in June. It’s quite nice to know that I’ve joined a bit of a Glasgow tradition of doing this: my line-manager John Veitch was responsible for GWTC-2.0, and my colleague Christopher Berry for GWTC-3.0. I can only apologise to either of them if I ever thought they seemed to have an easy job!
09 Jan 2025
It started as a nice, simple, short project to test some code I was working on. Things… got out of hand. Today I’ve submitted a paper describing a project I’ve been working on for around 18 months, which was not initially planned as a paper.
16 Aug 2024
This is a bug-fix release, and doesn’t introduce any new features. Breaking changes
19 Jan 2024
I’m pleased to announce the release of the latest version of asimov.
10 Nov 2023
I’m pleased to announce the release of the latest version of asimov.
10 Mar 2023
If you’re looking to try out asimov on your own laptop or workstation you’ll quickly run into a bit of a limitation: asimov, and the codes it works with, are designed to run on a large computing cluster. However, we can get around this by installing a lightweight version of the software used on clusters on your own machine before we try to run asimov.
21 Feb 2023
I’m very pleased to announce that the first release of the 0.4 development and review cycle for asimov!
21 Jun 2021
I remember as a child religiously reading the Argos catalogue; probably sometimes looking for Christmas presents, but often just looking at how many things you could possibly buy from one shop. As I got older I started to wonder how on earth they managed to put such a large catalogue together. Five years after the first detection of a gravitational wave signal, I have a little insight into just how hard the latter process is, and a little more appreciation for how much the Universe has to offer.
25 May 2021
The latest release of asimov is now available from our gitlab server, as well as being available on pypi.
2024
The Astrophysical Journal
2024
arXiv e-prints
2024
Physical Review D
2023
Physical Review X
2023
The Journal of Open Source Software
2021
Physical Review X
2024
arXiv e-prints
Project name:
asimov
Dates: 2020-02 - Present
Project Status: Ongoing
Project Description
Modern gravitational wave analysis can involve multiple analysis pipelines operating over dozens or even hundreds of events. Managing this at scale is a challenge; asimov is designed to simplify the construction and monitoring of analyses.