Documentation/UserGuide/Visualization

Athena does not come with a default graphics package. Instead, the user must decide which visualization package is best suited to their needs, output the data in a format which can be read by this package, and then proceed. As a start, rudimentary scripts for several different graphics packages are supplied with the source code; future versions may incorporate more sophisticated visualization tools. The following subsections describe useful visualization packages for Athena data files (the discussion assumes the code has already been run to produce output).

Supermongo

A popular package for making publication-quality one-dimensional plots is SM. A simple SM macro that can read tabular output from Athena is provided in ./athena/vis/sm.

IDL procedures

IDL (Interactive Data Language) procedures that can read both the binary and VTK dump files and make plots are included in ./athena/vis/idl. To run these procedures IDL must be installed on the system. From the ./athena/bin directory, use the following to read a binary file and make some one-dimensional plots:

    % idl
    IDL> .run ../vis/idl/pltath.pro 
    IDL> nine_plot,'Brio-Wu.0040.bin',1

A variety of potentially useful procedures are included in the pltath.pro file.

MatLab .m files

Matlab .m files can be used to read Athena .tab, .bin, and .vtk files. A number of examples are provided in the ./athena/vis/matlab directory.

Using VisIt to read VTK files

We have found the VisIt package, now supported by the DOE VACET center, useful for plotting 3D data sets. The VTK legacy format produced by Athena can be read by VisIt. For data created with executables parallelized with MPI, a C code that joins multiple files into one is provided in ./athena/vis/vtk. This is useful for jobs run on massively parallel clusters.

2D animations

Athena can output 2D images that can be displayed directly, or easily turned into animations. For example, if a series of ppm images of a single variable have been created, they can be displayed either using ImageMagick:

    % animate *.ppm

or, alternatively, xanim (which requires converting the ppm images to FLI format):

    % ls Wind*ppm > list1
    % ppm2fli -g80x80 list1 Wind.fli
    % xanim Wind.fli