INFORMATION ON BIEPACK (Version #2)

Copyright Notice

If there are any difficulties in using this release, I would like to know about them. This is the second release of the package, containing extensions and enhancements of the earlier package, and to date no complaints of problems have been received by the author. See below for a discussion of version #1 of the package. Read the User's Guide for information on using the package. The earlier main driver programs for solving various potential theory problems are still present, but some new ones have been added. These include the following.

1. Extensions to solving the unoccluded radiosity equation.
2. Special tools for handling efficiently polyhedral surfaces, including an illustrative example of their use.
3. A method for handling the normal derivative of a single layer operator, illustrated by solving an exterior Neumann problem on an ellipsoid.
4. Additional tools for calculating and manipulating surface normals.

The large utility and toolkit package tripack.f has been split apart into three packages named auxpack.f, intpack.f, and tripack.f. These are all described in the new User's Guide.

If you need additional information on the use of this package are have comments on it, please contact Ken Atkinson at the electronic address Kendall-Atkinson@uiowa.edu

The programs are available as individual files, and they are available combined as a tar file. For the latter case, proceed as described below for version #1 when using ftp. To transfer to the anonymous ftp directory, please click here. Note there are separate subdirectories for versions #1 and #2.

INFORMATION ON BIEPACK (Version #1)

The file bie.tar.Z contains the boundary element package BIEPACK. The programs are as described in the User's Guide. In addition, the programs d1mach.f and linsyslp.f are provided. The first defines machine constants needed in some of the subroutines of our package, and the second is a driver program to needed LINPACK programs, with those LINPACK programs also included.

The files are stored in compressed tar form, and a description of how to handle such files to obtain the fortran text files of the BIE package is given below. If you want directly the actual fortran files, please contact Ken Atkinson at the electronic address

     Kendall-Atkinson@uiowa.edu

Also, see the alternative transfer option described below.

If you wish to obtain BIEPACK, it is available under the anonymous ftp site for the Dept of Mathematics. Below we give instructions for handling the file bie.tar.Z once you have transferred it to your site. Then save the file to your computer by the appropriate instruction for your viewer. To transfer to the anonymous ftp directory, please click here.

INSTRUCTIONS

1. Place the file in a suitable directory.
2. Use the uncompress program for your computer system. This should generate a tar file from the tar.Z file. On unix systems, you will use the command uncompress bie.tar.Z
3. Use tar with the xvf options on the tar file. For example, "tar xvf bie.tar". This should extract the source files.
4. In the various main program files, the standard input and output unit numbers are referred to by the INTEGER variables TML_IN and TMLOUT, respectively. They are presently set to TML_IN=5 and TMLOUT=6, the standard unit numbers for Unix systems. The user will need to change these for other systems.

Under our departmental anonymous ftp site, the User's Guide is provided in three formats, and all of them are stored in compressed format in the subdirectory (of the current directory) users-guide. The formats are

• A dvi file, named guide.dvi.Z
• A postscript file named guide.ps.Z
• A Latex file. The guide contains some illustrations, and the needed eps files will also need to be transferred. The needed eps files have names of the form user#.eps, and they should be transferred along with the latex file.

ALTERNATIVE TRANSFER OPTION: It is preferable to use the above means to transfer the combined programs in the package. However, for those who cannot use the above option, the individual programs are stored in compressed format in the subdirectory biepack.progs.

Please send all comments to Kendall-Atkinson@uiowa.edu.

ALTERNATIVE TRANSFER OPTION: It is preferable to use the above means to transfer the combined programs in the package. However, for those who cannot use the above option, the individual programs are stored in compressed format in the subdirectory biepack.progs.