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Simulation type:

I'm running a simulation with the OOMMF micromagnetics package

http://math.nist.gov/oommf/

where are magnet is represented by a mesh of 3 million cells, it gets excited by a magnetic pulse, the single cells oscillate and data output for every cell is x, y, z direction and absolute magnetic field value of every component over time, so a mini-magnet. Now I want to do a FFT on m_z(t) for every cell and later visualize this magnet over time while cells with m_z(t) showing common oscillation modes/eigenfrequencies get same color.

Data output format:

it is "data binary 4" and as said x, y, z and absolute field value for every component is given for all time steps (below 300-500 time steops)

The manual says:

The binary representations are IEEE floating point in network byte order (MSB). To insure that the byte order is correct, and to provide a partial check that the le hasn't been sent through a non 8-bit clean channel, the first datum is a predened value: 1234567.0 (Hex: 49 96 B4 38) for 4-byte mode, and 123456789012345.0 (Hex: 42 DC 12 21 83 77 DE 40) for 8-byte mode. The data immediately follow the check value. The structure of the data depends on whether the \meshtype" declared in the header is \irregular" or \rectangular". For irregular meshes, each data element is a 6-tuple, consisting of the x, y and z components of the node position, followed by the x, y and z components of the field at that position. Ordering among the nodes is not relevant. The number of nodes is specied in the \pointcount" line in the segment header. For rectangular meshes, data input is field values only, in x, y, z component triples. These are ordered with the x index incremented first, then the y index, and the z index last. This is nominally Fortran order, and is adopted here because commonly x will be the longest dimension, and z the shortest, so this order is more memory-access ecient than the normal C array indexing of z, y, x. The size of each dimension is specied in the \xnodes, ynodes, znodes" lines in the segment header.

I use a rectangluar mesh here

Question:

The FFT can be done using something like MATHEMATICA or MATLAB for a single cell and (m_z/ number, time/number) data list .dat file, but a data binary 4 file for a single time step for 3 million cells is up to 20 MB big, workstation with 30 GB RAM and 12 Cores available. The manual above mentions FORTRAN (to my knowledge not so easy to learn language although very fast).

What is the way to achieve the results I'm looking for and described above? From my point of view I face the problem to do the FFT in reasonable time with a script process for around 3 million cells and then transforming that data into a spectrogram (to see what different eigenfrequencies and higher harmonics exist, also this can be done by using the average m_z (summed over all single cells) and simply FFT it) but also have a output format of that data binary 4 format after FFT that can be used to feed a visualization software that can read such mesh data and color code it, show single 2D slices of the 3D object.

I read that MATHEMATICA can deal with binary 4 and offers high performance, but as this is completely new land to me, I first want to ask given above constraints and wishes, what is the best way and software/programming language to achieve this in reasonable time (few weeks)?

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20 MB data files are really not very large any more, on machines like yours. I would expect Mathematica to be able to read it in under a few seconds, and to be able to do an FFT in a few seconds to maybe a minute. You could try this by simply starting Mathematica, creating a vector with 3 million randomly chosen entries, and asking Mathematica to do the FFT. If this happens within an acceptable time scale, then it's worth writing an interface that can read the data you have.

In essence, what I'm trying to say is that you may be unnecessarily scared by the size of your data. Any reasonable programming environment that offers you to manage data vectors and do an FFT should suffice. This includes Mathematica, Maple, Matlab, or C/C++ programs linked against the FFTW package. I would expect any of them to give you results in a modest amount of runtime.

Mathematica, Matlab and Maple will have the additional advantage that they have many ways of visualizing data.

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  • $\begingroup$ I agree. I can imagine that doing the calculation in parallel should also be reasonably easy, as you can calc the FT's independently! With 12 cores that should't take long. $\endgroup$
    – MPIchael
    Commented Apr 26, 2019 at 13:37

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