Physics 210: Intro Computational Physics: Online Course Resources

Please e-mail suggestions or corrections to choptuik@physics.ubc.ca

This page subject to update throughout the course: Last updated September 6, 2009

Note: "PDF" denotes Adobe Portable Document Format.

Index

General Information, Unix/Linux, bash & tcsh

Text Editors


Searching the Web

  • Google. Arguably still the premier Web search-engine.
  • Bing: The relatively new kid on the block from the corporation that needs not be named :-)
  • WolframAlpha: Wolfram's new "Computational Knowledge Engine".  Worth checking out if you haven't yet done so.

Creating Web Pages ( HTML documents)

1. Use a web authoring tool

  • The seamonkey browser installed on hyper includes composer which allows you to easily create and modify basic web pages such as those used for this course. To use it, start seamonkey, then either choose Composer from the Window pull-down menu at the top of the browser, or click the Composer icon (looks like a pen and piece of paper) at the bottom left.  Usage of composer should be largely self-explanatory, and there is a built-in  help facility for the seamonkey package (see the section Creating New Web Pages)
  • The quanta application, also installed on hyper, is a very powerful web authoring tool that you might also want to consider, particularly if you want web pages that contain forms, plugins and other advanced features. It also has an extensive online help facility.

2. Doing it "by hand" (i.e. using a text editor and learning HTML)

Graphing (XY plots)

Maple (Symbolic Manipulation)

MATLAB

Octave & Qtoctave

  • octave Home Page
    • octave documentation [HTML]
    • info documentation (for help with octave's doc command) [HTML]
  • qtoctave Home Page (note that this product is still very much under development, and the English documentation isn't always very good)

Scilab

Visualization Utilities

xfpp3d

OpenGL/xforms-based program for animating 2- and 3-D particle motion.

Basic help is available via

% xfpp3d -h

Refer to the above link for the help message, which includes a definition of the input format.

Sample 20-body input file, input20.  Use

% xfpp3d < input20

to view.

Sample 20-body input file, input20c, that uses different colors for different particles. Use

% xfpp3d -c < input20c

to view.

Documentation describing the creation of mpeg animations using this program is available HERE.

MATLAB / octave function file nbodyout.m.

Function nbodyout writes typical N-body output to file in the format expected by xfpp3d. Note that this function file is installed in ~phys210/octave on hyper.
xflat2d

Open GL/xforms-based program for visualization of two-dimensional binary valued lattices.

Basic help is available via

% xflat2d -h

Refer to the above link for the help message, which includes a definition of the input format.

Sample input file, inputlife, from Game of Life simulation. Use

% xflat2d < inputlife

to view.

Documentation describing the creation of mpeg animations using this program is available HERE.
xflat2d_rgb

Identical to xflat2d except that sites are colored with an aribitrary color, specified as an 0.0 .. 1.0 normalized RGB triple (e.g. (0.0,1.0,0.0) is green (1.0,1.0,1.0) is white etc.) that can change at each time step.

Basic help is available via

% xflat2d_rgb -h

Refer to the above link for the help message, which includes a definition of the input format.

Sample usage

% xflat2d_rgb < input

Documentation describing the creation of mpeg animations using this program is available HERE.
xvs

xvs is a visualization tool for analyzing, among other things, the output of time-dependent PDEs in one spatial dimension (or time dependent cuts of higher-d solutions).

Some documentation for xvs is availabe HERE.  Contact the instructor or one of the TAs should you need help.
DV

DV is a visualization server, similar in spirit to xvs, but capable of visualizing 2-D and even 3-D data. Basic online documentation is available HERE.

Information on using DV to make mpeg animations is available HERE. Contact the instructor of one of the TAs should you need help.


Numerical Algorithms

General Computational Physics Resources


NOTE: Entries marked with ** denote online journals to which UBC subscribes.  To access the articles in these journals (typically in PDF format), you will either have to be using a computer connected to the UBC network (including UBC wireless), or have your computer configured for remote access. See HERE for the various options you have to enable remote access.
  • Open Source Physics (OSP)
  • **American Journal of Physics (AJP). The articles in this journal are generally accessible to undergrads, and some are devoted to aspects of computational physics (click HERE for a list of 200+ papers with the keyword "computational" in the full bibliographic record.  You may find this to be a good resource for ideas for term projects.
    • A Recent Resource Letter by Rubin Landau published in AJP and providing "a guide to print and electronic literature relevant to a computational
      physics course: (PDF)
  • **Computing in Science & Engineering (also see its predecessor **Computers in Physics).  Bi-monthly magazine published by the IEEE which has articles on many topical aspects of computational science. Generally accessible to undergrads.
  • **Journal of Computational Physics (JCP) This is an advanced research journal in computational physics, but in doing research for your term project, you may find references to articles published in it.

General Physics Resources

Maintained by choptuik@physics.ubc.ca. Supported by CIFAR, NSERC, CFI, BCKDF and UBC