Date of Award

2003

Document Type

Thesis

Publisher

Edith Cowan University

Degree Name

Bachelor of Science Honours

Faculty

Faculty of Computing, Health and Science

First Supervisor

Dr Dong Li

Abstract

To gain further knowledge of how the universe began, a new international co-operated project wishes not only to "see" stars exploding, but also to "hear" the explosion. It is theorised that the ability to "listen" to an explosion is possible by detecting gravitational waves. Gravitational waves are omitted when a star explodes, travelling through the cosmos at an exceptional speed. It is estimated that a gravity wave takes only 40 milliseconds to pass through the earth. Thus the aim of this international collaboration is to detect a gravitational wave. To accurately detect such waves, there needs to be several global detectors. If a phenomenon is detected at one detector, data from other detectors is compared; to investigate whether this event occurred simultaneously around the world. An integral component of gravitational wave detection includes the real· time saving of signals as data on a generic storage media, e.g. a standard hard disk and later permanent storage e.g. on compact discs. It is therefore crucial that there is a constant 24-hour data gathering from the detectors. 24-hours of constant data gathering requires a system that can facilitate for the acquisition of the data and save the data into a standard format, which was agreed upon by all the global gravity wave detection sites (known as the frame format. Please refer to appendix 9.1 for further details concerning this format.). This accommodates the exchange of the data for analysis between detection sites. To create exchangeable files in the frame format requires the data to be passed through C Unix based libraries. These libraries are cumbersome to utilize, require sufficient computing skills to use and are very inefficient when working with large amounts of data. The purpose of this honours project is to research and construct a graphical user interface under the Linux Operating System, to the frame libraries, in order to greatly assist in the data storage and exchange process.

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