Rechunking

Rechunking#

This example uses Xarray to rechunk a dataset.

Install the package pre-requisites by running the following:

pip install cubed cubed-xarray xarray pooch netCDF4

Open dataset#

Start by importing Xarray - note that we don’t need to import Cubed or cubed-xarray, since they will be picked up automatically.

import xarray as xr

xr.set_options(display_expand_attrs=False);

We open an Xarray dataset (in netCDF format) using the usual open_dataset function. By specifying chunks={} we ensure that the dataset is chunked using the on-disk chunking (here it is the netCDF file chunking). The chunked_array_type argument specifies which chunked array type to use - Cubed in this case.

ds = xr.tutorial.open_dataset(
    "air_temperature", chunked_array_type="cubed", chunks={}
)

The air data variable is a cubed.Array, and we can see that this small dataset has a single on-disk chunk.

ds["air"]
<xarray.DataArray 'air' (time: 2920, lat: 25, lon: 53)> Size: 31MB
cubed.Array<array-003, shape=(2920, 25, 53), dtype=float64, chunks=((2920,), (25,), (53,))>
Coordinates:
  * lat      (lat) float32 100B 75.0 72.5 70.0 67.5 65.0 ... 22.5 20.0 17.5 15.0
  * lon      (lon) float32 212B 200.0 202.5 205.0 207.5 ... 325.0 327.5 330.0
  * time     (time) datetime64[ns] 23kB 2013-01-01 ... 2014-12-31T18:00:00
Attributes: (11)

Rechunk#

To change the chunking we use Xarray’s chunk function:

rds = ds.chunk({'time':1}, chunked_array_type="cubed")

Looking at the air data variable again, we can see that it is now chunked along the time dimension.

rds["air"]
<xarray.DataArray 'air' (time: 2920, lat: 25, lon: 53)> Size: 31MB
cubed.Array<array-004, shape=(2920, 25, 53), dtype=float64, chunks=((1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 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Coordinates:
  * lat      (lat) float32 100B 75.0 72.5 70.0 67.5 65.0 ... 22.5 20.0 17.5 15.0
  * lon      (lon) float32 212B 200.0 202.5 205.0 207.5 ... 325.0 327.5 330.0
  * time     (time) datetime64[ns] 23kB 2013-01-01 ... 2014-12-31T18:00:00
Attributes: (11)

Save to Zarr#

Since Cubed has a lazy computation model, the data has not been loaded from disk yet. We can save a copy of the rechunked dataset by calling to_zarr:

rds.to_zarr("rechunked_air_temperature.zarr", mode="w", consolidated=True);
/opt/hostedtoolcache/Python/3.10.16/x64/lib/python3.10/site-packages/xarray/core/dataset.py:2629: SerializationWarning: saving variable None with floating point data as an integer dtype without any _FillValue to use for NaNs
  return to_zarr(  # type: ignore[call-overload,misc]

This will run a computation that loads the input data and writes it out to a Zarr store on the local filesystem with the new chunking. We can check that it worked by re-loading from disk using xarray.open_dataset and checking that the chunks are the same:

ds = xr.open_dataset(
    "rechunked_air_temperature.zarr", chunked_array_type="cubed", chunks={}
)
assert ds.chunks == rds.chunks