New Computer

June 21st, 2010

Well, much progress has been made during week two.  Chuck returned home from Salt Lake last Monday and we sat down for a little while a talked about a lot of things.  I had been working through some of his code and some code he downloaded from a PhD student in Alaska and it was my job to get both codes to work, and then mess the two codes.  I got through both codes and got both of them working, but on Tuesday, I discovered that Alaska's code does not do what we thought/needed it to do.  So we had to scrap that idea.  Plan B for the project was to get together with Heather, another research professor here and she has a few matlab packages that may work.  What we are trying to do is pull data from our Antelope database into Matlab so we can work with it.  Currently, we pull it from Antelope into SAC and then from SAC into Matlab.  This is a perfectly valid way of doing things, but it is inefficient with time and memory.  For example, one day of data has over 3 million data points for just one component of one station.  So you can imagine how much data we have for 19 stations with three components each.  So main goal at this time, go straight from Antelope into Matlab. 

So on Tuesday we talked with Heather and she gave me the Matlab environment and scripts that accomplish this and we found that Antelope only works in Chuck's old office.  So instead of trying to get the different programs to work on the graduate student computers, Chuck just moved me into his old office.  Which is nice.  I now have  a 24" Mac with a second 24" monitor, almost a terabytes of memory to work with and like 4 gigs of ram.  So needless to say, I am enjoying my new surroundings.  (In case you are wondering, I was working on very old Sun computers that were very slow).

By Wednesday I figured out the Matlab scripts (with the help of Heather).  So Thursday and Friday I spent the day playing with data and become familiar with all the scripts, their capabilities and limitations.  I wrote code that allows me to pull data from almost any time window from any component of any station.  Though I did run into a tiny problem that Chuck and I dont know how to handle yet.  For some reason we cant pull data from two 'rows'.  In other words, if we want data from the end of day 1 and the beginning of day 2, we cant because we day is a new row.  Normally this would not be a big deal, but what if there is an event that starts at the end of day 1 and goes through the beginning of day 2?  We wont be able to look at that event in a continuous manner.  So we are dealing with that right now and we will see what happens.

So goals for today/this week is to be able to take data from Antelope and plug it into his code which will help use do some frequency/wavenumber analysis.  Hopefully I will be successful so that we can start finding these little earthquake and find out their origins.