Computing in astronomy help
The goal of this website is to advise on what computing resources are already out there and can help you get up to speed without needing to reinvent the wheel. You may want to take these links as a starting point, and then look for further related tutorials and books, as well as talking to people.'C' - Strengths: FLOPS, portability, legacy.
GNU scientific library - Free scientific library under active development.
Fortran - Strengths: FLOPS, portability, legacy.
Lapack - Famous linear algebra library for heavy duty matrix computations.
SLALIB - Positional astronomy library from the former UK 'Starlink' team.
Fortran examples - Scientific programs using g95. Handy for learning by example.
SLATEC - 'Over 14000 general purpose mathematical and statistical routines' including the Wigner 3J symbol.
IDL - Strengths: Visualisation, data I/O, prototyping. Fairly widely used in astronomy.
David 'Coyote' Fanning - Invaluable set of IDL routines and programming tips.
astrolib - Lots of handy astronomy orientated codes.
Markwardt IDL page - Lots more stuff including the very robust mpfit curve fitting program.
Michael Galloy - Author of IDLdoc, with an emphasis on visualisation.
IDL discussion group - If no local IDL guru can help you, then you can expect fast answers from this responsive discussion group.
Perl - Worth keeping in mind as a tool for acheiving and automating repetitive tasks such as code generation, retrieving and manipulating data from the the internet. May involve an investment of time to learn the syntax, and is possibly being superceded by Python.
Mathematics
MathWorld - Great online reference for mathematical formulae.
Wikipedia - Another great source for technical information.
Maple, Matlab and Mathematica - Mathematics and statistics programs licensed for use at SISSA.
Sage - Open source mathematics software that is said to be coming along as a package.
General day to day tools
emacs - Powerful text editor. Huge amount of 'extensions' available to handle, for instance, multiple buffers and colourised text.
g3data - Handy little package for extracting data points from a screen-grabbed scientific plot.
Subversion - A revision control system. Think seriously about setting up your own svn repository at SISSA. This is a great way to back up your codes, move them between laptop/desktop, and to collaborate on coding projects.
GNUPLOT - Pretty decent plotting program.
SuperMongo - SM - another plotting program worth knowing about.
Kompozer - "Easy web authoring" package.
CTAN - The "Comprehensive TeX Archive Network". Great collections of LaTeX template documents.
LyX - A LaTeX document processor. Can greatly aide making documents as well as writing up and doing algebra.
Tutorials
Introduction to C - From Phil Harris at Sussex University.
UNIX - Well worth putting in an up-front investment of time getting to know how to use unix if you're not already getting the most out of this.
SEPNet resource page - A handy compilation of tutorials for astro grad students.
MIT OpenCourseWare - Vast collection of courses at MIT.
Quick reference cards - Does exactly what it says on the tin.
Conjugate Gradient Solver - 'Without agonizing pain'. An outstanding introduction.
MPI - Tutorial on the Message Passing Interface. Ubiquitous protocol for passing data between processors, and hence for parellisation of codes.
MPI examples - Another tuturial (f90) with example codes for a variety of representative problems.
Send suggestions to Sam
Leach.
