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Review of Visualisation Systems
6.6 PV-WAVE
Application code can be incorporated into PV-WAVE CL at two levels, via user developed command language procedures or more appropriately user developed C or FORTRAN code. The description here will concentrate on the incorporation of user developed C or FORTRAN code as the incorporation of command language procedures is considered an integral part of the PV-WAVE CL package.
Two supplied PV-WAVE CL procedures, SPAWN and LINKLOAD enable application code to be incorporated into PV-WAVE CL and support the following languages:
- SPAWN: C and FORTRAN
- LINKLOAD: C
The SPAWN procedure provides a simple and efficient way to augment PV-WAVE CL with user developed C and FORTRAN code, and moreover provide a general mechanism for accessing the operating system. The procedure SPAWN spawns a child process to execute the application code, to which it communicates via a Unix pipe. Various input and output keywords are used to specify precise requirements. Where possible it is recommended that the required operation is performed entirely within PV-WAVE CL, as PV-WAVE CL is likely to be more efficient, particularly will small datasets.
The LINKLOAD procedure is used to access external functions in an external shared object i.e. the external code must be linked as a shared object. LINKLOAD is more efficient than SPAWN when communicating with application code and is the simplest method for attaching application code (C only) to PV-WAVE CL. Given that external objects must be linked as shared objects, LINKLOAD is only available on systems capable of supporting dynamic linking.
Useful examples are provided in the supplied documentation, although the manual descriptions do tend to be rather technical.
Review of Visualisation Systems
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