Autocorrelation

Overview

The "autocorrelation" (AC) program is based upon the generic analyzer. It computes the integrated autocorrelation time for time series of data, on a per column basis. It is particularly useful for processing output from Monte Carlo and molecular dynamics simulations. The program is available on all local machines.
The autocorrelation program was originally written in 2002/2003 by Erik Luijten for efficiency comparisons involving the Geometric Cluster Algorithm.

General usage

 autocorrelation [options] filename [starttime] [maxtime]

filename is a plain text file. Lines starting with a '#' will be ignored (use this feature to insert column descriptions and other information into your simulation data). If filename ends with '.gz' the file is assumed to be compressed with gzip and will be decompressed on the fly. Note that this happens in memory; no decompressed version of the file is written to disk. This has the advantage that no additional disk space is required and that no additional time is required to compress the data again after the analysis.

To read from standard input instead of a file, specify STDIN as the filename.

Options

• -a
• -c
• -e
• -f
• -m
• -o filename
  Write autocorrelation function to filename.
• -u
• -x

Download binary versions (Linux and OS X)

The current version is 4.0, dated September 2010. It is strongly recommend that you upgrade from any earlier version. You can download binary versions of this program here, but note that this was created for internal lab use - we cannot provide any support.

(binaries coming soon)