PHYSICS 141/241

 

Laboratory Session I: OS X Unix and Visualization

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 computational physics laboratory which is located at 4623 Mayer Hall. The 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. The configuration of the workstation platform was designed to be flexible with fast ethernet connection providing access to the campus and the Internet.

GPU computing in the lab

Matlab and Mathematica in the lab are good substitutions for many tasks

Laboratory Setup:

  • Accounts
  • Network
  • File System
  • Printing
  • Operating System

    • Assignment: Familiarize yourself with the Computer Lab setup as much as possible. Get your account working, check out your file system, check out the printer environment.

    2. Unix Tutorials 

    Basic Unix Tutorial

    Unix Tutorial

    We will practice the following selected topics:

  • Work With Your Users Account (Intro)
  • Getting Started
  • OS X Desktop
  • The Shell

    • Assignment: Work through the selected topics as listed above.

    3. C tutorials and Gnu web site:

    web link to C programming course

    C Programming tutorial

    GNU Software

    4. Safari WEB Browser

    The main functions of Safari:
  • Browsing on the Internet
  • Reading manuals
  • Displaying animations

    • Assignment: Set up Safari according to your preferences.

     

    5. First Look at Data Visualization: GNUPLOT

  • GNUPLOT WEB SITE FOR INFORMATION

  • GNUPLOT ONLINE DOCUMENTATION

  • FAQ

  • Useful and simple tutorial

  • command:

    /software/ports/bin/gnuplot

    •

    6. 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 ]

     

    7. Preview of the Nemo N-body package

    Nemo web site

    glnemo2 visualization