PHYSICS 141/241
Winter 2006
Laboratory Session I
1/9/06
1. The Computational Physics Laboratory
As an important part of the new
Computational Physics Program, in a collaborative effort with UCSD
Academic Computing Services, we
built a state-of-the-art computational physics laboratory which
is located at 6126 Urey Hall. The new laboratory has a farm of modern
workstations with scientific visualization and multimedia capabilities,
access to a server of sufficient computational power and disk storage
to implement the software gracefully, and auxillary equipment such as
high-resolution laser printer, color printer, color scanner, etc. The
configuration of the workstation
platform was designed to be flexible. Each machine is dual bootable
into Windows/NT and the Linux operating systems on demand, and a fast
ethernet connection provides access to the campus and the Internet. As
an important fringe benefit, this laboratory will also develop into a
multifunctional role as a center and laboratory for the future phases
of the program.
As an example, based on the Beowulf model with fast ethernet connection
between nodes and with MPI software in parallel applications,
the laboratory will have the potential to provide first hand experience
for advanced students in parallel supercomputing.
Laboratory Setup:
Assignment: Familiarize
yourself with the Computer Lab setup
as much as possible. Get your account working, access phcomp.ucsd.edu
from different environments, check out your file system, check out the
printer
environment.
2. Redhat Linux Enterprise 3 (Step by Step)
HTML online manual
We will practice the
following selected topics:
Assignment: Work
through the selected topics as listed above.
3. Mozilla WEB Browser
The main functions of Mozilla:
Assignment: Set up
Mozilla according to your preferences.
Toy Galaxy Simulation in Mozilla
4. First Look at Data Visualization: GNUPLOT
5. Industry Strength Data Visualization: IBM Data Explorer
(OpenDX)
This professional grade visualization
platform is in the public
domain now. We will adapt this package as our data visualization
package. The introductory manual (Quickstart Guide) is available now
for a first look. You can read the manual in HTML
format using your Netscape browser. You can also download the manual in
postscript and PDF format.
The IBM Documentation
for Data Explorer exists in different formats.
Quickstart Guide:
This guide presents a "hands on" introduction to Data Explorer and is
designed to help you start working with it immediately.
[ | HTML
]
Assignment: Read
Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 from the manual
and work out the suggested tutorial exercises.