TABLE OF CONTENTS Graphic displays of results from particle simulations are essential for efficiently analysing physical problems and finding errors. There are many software tools for visualizing results from scientific analyses. Sonic arc simple, easy to use. find provide relatively crude quality output easily. The freeware software, gnuplot. is in tins class. With some effort, gnnplot can be used to produce publication-quality graphics. A majority of the Figures in this book were generated with gnuplot. Other graphical tools cost money and .support good quality output with less work. The commercial products. Mathematica and Matlab. provide the functionality for displaying results in a variety of topologies. The input data for gnuplot, Mathematica. and Matlab are all in the form of text files generated by the user's program.
Sophisticated visualization tools developed for grid-based continuum calculations have been extended to include plotting results from particle simulations. The Griz4 and VisIt visualization tools developed at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory are examples. Griz4 has been used to generate several Figures in this book. See Figures 4.1, 4.2, 4.9, 4.11, 4.13, and 4.14 in this Chapter. Such visualization tools use binary file formats so that large three-dimensional databases axe read efficiently, without time-consuming conversion from "asci" to "binary" form. The binary file formats are generated by special-purpose subroutine libraries. The libraries produce a flexible database format to treat the grid objects found in regularly-zoned grids and in finite-element and finite-volume grids. The subroutine libraries are designed to support the element shapes ( bricks,...
