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Info on doing Data Analysis using BFC
Offline computing tutorial Maintained by Kathy

When doing your data analysis and/or studying the behavior of a certain piece of code, you should work in your area. If you need to change any code, kumacs or parameters you should check it out of CVS (using appropriate library version) into your area and make the changes.

If you have studied how your change will affect the code and it is to become the new default version, you will need to inform the person responsible for code in that domain and make sure that it is alright to make the change in CVS. Then check it into CVS.

Procedure for changing and studying the behavior of a certain piece of code:

  1. If you want to study a particular value in a table and don't know which code fills it, you should use one of the Browsers
  2. You figure out which PAM (code) you are interested in and then the kumacs that initialize and run that PAM are in pams/domain/kumac/*pam_name*.kumac. The output tables for the PAM are created in pams/domain/kumac/create_tables_domain.kumac with a macro with the name of the PAM.
  3. Now you must find out which chain variable in BFC kumac runs that PAM. To do this you can read Details of BFC kumac or you can look at $STAR/kumacs/chain/bfc_util.kumac directly and figure out the name of the chain.
  4. You should look at $STAR/kumacs/chain/bfc_util.kumac and see exactly which kumacs/macros are executed for the chain of interest.
  5. Now you will know which code/kumacs you must check out and change in order to do your particular study.
  6. NOTE: The init_PAM.kumac files have several different macros and not all are called by BFC! This is because the parameter initialization is now done by reading in default xdf files from $STAR/params/domain and not in these kumacs. Typically we have:
    • macro init - this IS called by bfc_util and is where you should make any changes to parameters that you need for your study
    • macro fill - not called by bfc_util. This is used to set default values of parameters when a new xdf parameter file is to be written and is executed by $STAR/kumacs/util/write_params.kumac

You should read the tutorial pages for more information, especially the following: