GSoC 2026 - Week 8

Here is week 8 update for my project:

I spent almost all of this week on lag-time based analysis widgets.

I merged the support for MSD analysis as part of PR #35, which was under review last week. Based on the review, I removed windowed averages and added support for per-particle MSDs and a configurable option to display them.

Here are some of the changes made as part of this PR:

• Add a new SlidingWindowMSD class that is O(n) for each window
• Support to compute and display particle MSDs
• Support for configuring selection, dimension type and log scale

Support for calculating and displaying the diffusion coefficient plot (based on MSD results) was added as part a different PR that is under review (see below).

I created PR #37 to add a widget for ACF Analysis based on the same issue Amru raised to support lag-time based calculations in Issue #34. This PR is currently in review.

The PR was initially added for Velocity Autocorrelation Function (VACF), but based on the review, we extended it to be a generic ACF widget where users can pick the physical property (position, velocity, force).

Here is an example:

Generic ACF

There is support for centering (mean subtracted) and normalizing the plots as well.

In addition, there is support for displaying a running integral, which in the case of VACF can show the diffusion coefficient that we can compare against with the MSD diffusion coefficient plot as shown below:

Diffusion Coefficients

There were some minor bug fixes (frame resetting in case of parallel runs), switch from PNG to JPEG for better plot performance and a minor change that now enables using mdadash for file based trajectories as well.

The original plan for this week was to work on adding support for user-defined custom analysis widgets through the Notebook like interface from the dashboard UI. This now has been pushed to next week. I will get started on this after resolving any other issues from the ACF PR.