Pen of PIGS

This repository contains a simplified implementation of the path integral ground state quantum Monte Carlo method. While the code seems to produce correct results and run reasonably fast, it is primarily intended for pedagogical purposes. Clarity and conciseness of the presentation are favored over numerical stability and performance tricks. If you would prefer something with the opposite design goals, see WA-PIMC by Adrian Del Maestro instead.

Overview

Pen of PIGS was written by Sampsa "Tuplanolla" Kiiskinen to support his bachelor's thesis on quantum statistical mechanics. Even though the project was in the works for a while, the bulk of the work happened between 2016-11-01 and 2017-01-23.

License

Pen of PIGS is free software and as such licensed under the GNU General Public License version 3 or later. The full license can be found in the LICENSE file that resides in the same directory as this file. In short, copies and derivative works are permitted as long as they use a compatible license.

Requirements

Pen of PIGS is written in C (per ISO/IEC 9899:2011) and makes heavy use of POSIX features (per POSIX.1-2008). Its only dependency, aside from build essentials, is the GNU Scientific Library (available, at least in the case of Debian, in the libgsl0-dev package).

Although graphics support is not necessary, a handful of useful visualizations are provided as Gnuplot scripts, so it may be a good idea to install that as well (the scripts use the wxt and epslatex terminals by default, which, for Debian, requires the gnuplot-x11 package).

Debugging is not necessary either, but, if desired, requires Valgrind and Cppcheck.

Some automation is also available in the form of Bourne shell scripts.

Usage

Pen of PIGS comes with several frontends for different kinds of computations. You can compile and run them as follows.

$ make build
$ make run

Note that these invocations use the default build environment, which depends on your system and, while reliable, may not be ideal. For this reason specialized options and targets exist.

The available targets are

• run to run the program,
• check to check the program for memory leaks and other potential problems,
• build to compile the program,
• plot to render visualizations,
• deep-clean to remove all generated files (including runs),
• clean to remove all quickly generated files (excluding runs) and
• shallow-clean to remove only unimportant generated files.

The supported compilers (CC) are

• clang for the C Language Family Frontend for LLVM and
• gcc for the GNU Compiler Collection.

The possible configurations (CONFIG) are

• debug for debugging and
• release for real computations.

You can put these into good use as follows.

$ make CC=clang CONFIG=debug clean check
$ make CC=gcc CONFIG=release clean run

Anything Else

Read the source code. It is not scary. I promise.