Introduction & Learning Python Packaging

19 Jun 2026 - Tanvir Islam - Learning, Python, packaging, libraries

What My Project Is About

My project is based around S2FFT, a Python package for working with data on the sphere. This is really useful in areas where the data naturally sits on a round surface, like climate modelling, astronomy, geophysics, computer graphics, and machine learning.

The parts that interest me most are using GPU acceleration to speed up these computations, exploring how libraries like JAX can make the algorithms differentiable, and seeing how these tools can be applied to real examples.

Highlights From This Week

This was my first week at UCL ARC! I met with my fantastic project supervisors, set up my laptop, and had a chance to tour the office.

In terms of my project, I learned about using libraries, installing packages, organising code, using argparse, and the basics of packaging a project. A lot of this was new to me, but it helped me understand how Python code can be structured so it is easier to run and reuse.

I also attended the UCL Festival of Digital Research, Innovation & Scholarship, hearing from various researchers and partners how they collaborate with UCL on cutting-edge research. I got to know more about what ARC does and why their work is so essential.

Seeing how welcoming everyone was made it a really positive start to the internship.

Plan For Next Week

Next week I plan to start getting familiar with JAX and begin exploring S2FFT. I want to work through the basic JAX ideas first, then try running some of the S2FFT tutorial examples.