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Computing for Science

The Computing for Science (CS) group supports ILL scientists, students and visitors in a number of activities including data analysis, instrument simulation and sample simulation.

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The CS group can assist you in retrieving data from measurements (we recommend the IDA web service).
There is extensive documentation about the ILL text data format.  There is summary of the significance of parameters for the main classes of instrument.  Tools/routines are available to read data files; you may also use general tools like looktxt and LAMP. 

Data Access and Treatment

Typical data layouts are described in the following links:

Raw Data

Data Treatment

Export Data


These definitions will aid you develop your own software solutions. 

The CS group provides some in-house data treatment and analysis software, e.g.:

LAMP: Large Array Manipulation Program neutron data analysis

MatLab ILL: Some Matlab programs MFit/MView (for TAS and others)

PkFit/Filing: Software for treating and analysing TAS neutron data


as well as suites of programs for certain classes of instruments. You may also try out our Live DVD with many of these software.

Web Services

Our group has developed over the years a few web services to aid users in preparing and analyse their experiments.

IDA - remote access to the ILL database

BARNS - an application portal from which you can download data or run ILL programs over the web

ILL/Computing for Science software pre-installed on a LiveDVD

The Computing for Science group has built a custom LiveDVD which gathers some ILL related software to be used for data analysis and simulation. It runs on all Intel/AMD based computers and contains LAMP, nMoldyn, McStas, Matlab MFit/MView and GRASP, FullProf, vTAS, ResTrax and SimRes, looktxt, idl2matlab as well as many other scientific software:

  • C, C++ and Fortran compilers, Java, Python, Perl, Tcl/Tk, MPICH,
  • Python libs: Matplotlib, numpy, scientific, tk, numeric
  • AbInit, Chemtool, Gelemental, Ghemical, Gperiodic,
  • Gromacs, mopac, MPQC, PyMol, Rasmol, Viewmol,
  • BallView, Avogadro, DrawXtl, CBFlib DX, Fityk, Gabedit, Garlic, Gcrystal,
  • Scilab, Octave, PerlDL, PGPLOT, netcdf, ncview, hdf4, hdf5, nexus, hdfview
  • GeomView, OpenBabel, ParaView, Maxima, Java3d, Mayavi,
  • gimp, virtualbox, openoffice, freewrl, partimage, gparted



These are pre-installed on the DVD-embedded Ubuntu system <http://ubuntu.com>. Running it does not affect your own computer system, and runs entirely from the DVD and in the computer memory, You are free to install this DVD (an Install icon is on the Desktop), aside your existing system (Windows, Mac OSX, Linux). The DVD supports 64 bit architectures (that is more than 3 Gb of memory) and multi-CPU systems (including clusters). Some Windows and MacOSX installers are also available on the DVD (ILL_CS_Software directory).

You may burn the DVD from:


where you will find documentation, an ISO (3.7 Gb) and DVD cover documents.

Usage:

  1. burn the DVD iso,
  2. reboot your computer,
  3. press Return at the 'boot:' prompt,
  4. then select 'Live CD session' (1st item in the menu) when the blue style splash shows up
  5. login as cs_guest without password
  6. use and/or install (requires at least a 10 Gb partition)
  7. or simply get the Windows and MacOSX installers in the DVD ILL_CS_Software directory

Notes/known bugs:

  1. The Network proxy is set to http://proxy.ill.fr:8888 for use at the ILL.  Change it from menu System/Preferences/Network Proxy
  2. To run LAMP with iTools, you will need to install an additional package from  <http://packages.debian.org/stable/base/libstdc++5>