The Python Sky Model 3 software

TL;DR

PySM 3 is a reimplemented Python package for simulating Galactic emission maps at CMB frequencies, offering improved performance and scalability while maintaining full compatibility with its predecessor PySM 2.

Contribution

PySM 3 introduces a new, optimized implementation of Galactic emission simulations using JIT compilation, MPI, and distributed transforms, addressing limitations of PySM 2 for upcoming high-resolution experiments.

Findings

PySM 3 matches PySM 2 outputs across models.

Performance improvements reduce memory usage and increase speed.

Scalability enabled through MPI and distributed spherical harmonic transforms.

Abstract

The Python Sky Model (PySM) is a Python package used by Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) experiments to simulate maps, in HEALPix pixelization, of the various diffuse astrophysical components of Galactic emission relevant at CMB frequencies (i.e. dust, synchrotron, free-free and Anomalous Microwave Emission), as well as the CMB itself. These maps may be integrated over a given instrument bandpass and smoothed with a given instrument beam. PySM 2, released in 2016, has become the de-facto standard for simulating Galactic emission, for example it is used by CMB-S4, Simons Observatory, LiteBird, PICO, CLASS, POLARBEAR and other CMB experiments, as shown by the 80+ citations of the PySM 2 publication. As the resolution of upcoming experiments increases, the PySM 2 software has started to show some limitations, the solution to these issues was to reimplement PySM from scratch focusing on these features: reimplement all the models with the numba Just-In-Time compiler for Python to reduce memory overhead and optimize performance; use MPI through mpi4py to coordinate execution of PySM 3 across multiple nodes and rely on libsharp, for distributed spherical harmonic transforms; employ the data utilities infrastructure provided by astropy to download the input templates and cache them when requested. At this stage we strive to maintain full compatibility with PySM 2, therefore we implement the exact same astrophysical emission models with the same naming scheme. In the extensive test suite we compare the output of each PySM 3 model with the results obtained by PySM 2.