QPEACE Homepage


Licensing Requirements Components Download Contact

Welcome to the homepage for QPEACE, a suite of software designed for use with the data from the PEACE (electron) instrument on the Cluster mission. Dr. Andrew Fazakerley, MSSL, is the Principal Investigator of the PEACE instrument. It is highly likely that the software would also work for other sweep-structured IDFS virtual instrument once the appropriate instrument names were added to the user interface. QPEACE is written by Prof. Steve Schwartz, Queen Mary, University of London, who is a PEACE Co-Investigator.

Licensing

The software is provided "as is" under a Gnu Public License. QPEACE accesses PEACE data using the IDFS data system. IDFS is written by South West Research Institute (Dr. David Winningham, PI) and has its own licensing policy (see http://www.idfs.org). QPEACE also uses the PGPLOT graphics package (http://www.astro.caltech.edu/~tjp/pgplot/) which, while freely available, is subject to its own license conditions. Finally, the Graphical User Interface is built using the Qt toolkit (http://www.trolltech.com). Qt forms the basis for the KDE Linux desktop environment; QPEACE is built using the Free Edition which is subject to Q Public License and GPL.

Requirements

In brief, if you wish to simply download and run the binary applications, there are no licensing restrictions to worry about, although you will need access to an IDFS database which holds the data of interest. You will also need a local, working copy of SDDAS (www.sddas.org) to set up the interface to, and retrieve data from, this database. If you wish/need to build the software from the source files, you will need to install local versions of IDFS, PGPLOT, and Qt paying appropriate attention to licensing matters.. [In practice, only IDFS requires action to sign a license agreement prior to obtaining the necessary source code.]

QPEACE is written mainly in C, with Qt widgets in C++. It is compiled using gcc/g++ and built routinely on Linux (Mandrake) and Sun/Solaris platforms. A bundle of libraries is provided for users without local copies of cdf, pgplot, and Qt shareable libraries. SDDAS should be installed from www.sddas.org.

There are no plans to port QPEACE to Windows or MacOS platforms. Anyone wishing to attempt this is welcome to try. SDDAS and CDF support Windows and MacOs; Qt is available for Windows. Pgplot is available in (FORTRAN + C wrappers) source but will need to be able to serve X-windows unless plot files (gif or postscript) are adequate.

Components

At present there are three components to QPEACE:
 
Component Documentation and Screenshots Description
QPEACE Modules QPEACE Doc A collection of routines, including a small number of higher level routines, to access, manipulate, and display data from PEACE energy sweeps, pitch angle distributions, and 3D spins. These routines would be suitable for further specialised software modules
QJAS QJAS Doc An application to generate time series spectograms of (typically) pitch angle distributions based on an original plot design by J-A Sauvaud (CESR, Toulouse). A stack of spectrograms is produced, one for each energy level. Within each spectrogram, the pitch angle information (0->180 degrees) is displayed. QJAS will also accept 3D data, in which case the angle information is based on the polar look directions of the sensors. QSAS will output these data products into ascii or CDF files which conform to Cluster/ISTP standards.
PLOTAZ PLOTAZ Doc An application to select a pair of azimuthal slices from a 3D distribution (or the equivalent single slice from a pitch angle distribution) and plot them in a 2D "wheel" plot. PLOTAZ also provides further analysis capability to perform arithmetic on the two selected slices (add, subtract, multiply, divide) or to take 1D cuts of any of the original or derived distributions. Finally, the distributions can be "mapped" using Liouville's Theorem with specified potential and magnetic field conditions.

Download

Qpeace_linux tar'ed bundle of Linux binaries, source code, and full documentation for all components
Qpeace_solaris tar'ed bundle of Sun/Solaris binaries, source code, and full documentation for all components
linux_libs
solaris_libs
tar'ed bundle of libraries expected by QPEACE routines. If your system doesn't already have these, or if QPEACE modules fail to startup or run, download this bundle and modify the scripts QJAS and PLOTAZ to add these to your LD_LIBRARY_PATH (see the comments in those scripts for instructions). If you use KDE and suspect your version of qt is causing the problem, you MAY need to put our libqt.so in the same directory as the executables and/or run the applications from there, since KDE has your local qt library pre-loaded.

Contact

We welcome comments, feedback, and bug/problem reporting. Email S.J.Schwartz@qmul.ac.uk
You might find some of our other software products of interest. See http://www.space-plasma.qmul.ac.uk/SOFTWARE/
Last up-date: 5 April 2002