The GRASP package includes routines for reading and using data in the
FRAME format. Also included in the GRASP package is a translator (see
Section ![[*]](file:/usr/local/latex2html-99.2/icons/crossref.gif){kind=icon}
) which translates data from the old data format
used in 1994 to the new FRAME format. Data distributed for use with
GRASP will primarily be distributed in this new FRAME format, and over
a period of time we will remove from the GRASP package all of the code
and routines which make use of the old format. In order to help make
the transition from old format to FRAME format as smooth as possible,
the GRASP package currently contains both old format and FRAME format
versions of all of the example programs. For example animate
and animateF are two versions of the same program. The first
reads data in the old format, the second reads data in the FRAME format.
If you are new to GRASP, we don't recomend that you waste your time with
the old data format; start using the FRAME format immediately.
Data distributed in the FRAME format may not be compatible with future
releases of the FRAME library, so if the FRAME libraries are updated you
may need to obtain a new copy of the standard 40-meter test data set from
November 1994. The data that has been distributed and is currently being
distributed makes use of either version 2.20, 2.30 or 2.37 of the
FRAME library. We will shortly begin distributing data in version
3.50 of the FRAME format.
Only two files in the GRASP package (src/utility/frameinterface.c
and src/examples/examples_utility/translate.c) depend upon the
version of the FRAME library. We distribute GRASP with versions of
these files appropriate for different releases.
The files determine the version of the frame library at compilation
time, and then include the appropriate code. This code works
correctly with any version of the frame library
. Note that version 
of the frame library can
read data written by any version back to and including 2.37.
One of the nice properties of the FRAME formats 
is that
they support a ``compressed" format. This is transparent to the user
(except that reading the ``compressed" frames takes a bit longer because the
frame library then needs to uncompress the data). Data distributed in version
3.50 of the FRAME format is being distributed in this compressed form and
occupies somewhat less space than the old-format original data. As shown
in Section the old-format data for the November 1994 runs
occupied about 13.6 Gbytes. For comparison, the FRAME-format data
occupies less than half of that space:
14nov94.1.frame 314
14nov94.2.frame 397
18nov94.1.frame 503
18nov94.2.frame 543
19nov94.1.frame 551 The space occupied
19nov94.2.frame 535 is shown in Mbytes
19nov94.3.frame 641
19nov94.4.frame 605
20nov94.1.frame 553
20nov94.2.frame 422
20nov94.3.frame 755
The total storage space required for FRAME 3.50 data totals only 5.8 Gbytes.
In order to give the 1994 40-meter data a form as similar as possible
to the data being taken in 1997 and beyond, the channel names used
have been given equivalent ``FRAME" forms. These are shown in
Table .
Note that new data created in the frame format attempts to address at
least a couple of the problems in the ``old format" data. In particular,
new frame format data (i.e., post 1996) has sample rate in Hz always being
powers of 2, for example, 4,096 Hz or 16 Hz or 16,384 Hz. In addition,
each frame always contains a power-of-two number of seconds of data.
These conventions will make it easy to ``match up" sample of channels
taken at different rates, and to do FFT's of the channels. However the
1994 data does not conform to either of these conventions: each frame of
1994 data contains 5000 samples of the slow channels, and 50,000 samples
of the fast channels, during a 
second interval.
14 Nov 94
18 Nov 94