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3.1 Programmes

The following programmes have been written specifically for extracting physical properties from the raw data and preparing this for visualisation.

The programmes which relate to extracting physical properties from the raw data are all run from a program called menu which prompts the user to select the appropriate option

The following options are available:

• creating mesons from the raw matrix data - this programme takes the raw data created by the UKQCD simulations and creates the required meson. (see section 4.1)
• averaging over a number of configurations - to make the visualisation more meaningful. (see section 4.2)
• converting timeslice data into probabilities - to make the values visualised more meaningful (see section 4.3)

There are a couple of things the user should note before using the programmes provided. It is very likely that the user will use a different machine to create the data for visualisation than that used to visualise the data. This can cause problems. Two specific problems have been discovered. The first is concerning the size the machine assigns to reals. On UKQCD this size is one, but on the Suns and SGI's this is four. A parameter called fsize has been encorporated into the programmes to compensate for this. The programme, menu, (see section 4.7) has been set up with a size of one for use on UKQCD, however if the programme is to be used elsewhere then this size will need to be checked and altered as appropriate. The second thing to note is the way the machine stores floating point numbers. For further information on this see section 4.5. Finally the user should read section 4.4 for an explanation of how to enter in filenames when using these programmes.

Shell scripts have also been used to carry out various tasks whilst working on this project. Shell scripts are a very useful way of carrying out tasks which involve entering a very similar command at the prompt many times, for example renaming a large number of files. For further information and examples see section 4.6.