Programs that are written to solve these types of problems have common elements: You have variables you want to vary in your model of your machine, you have "data" that you want to view, and, in the first two categories above, you want to match the machine model to the data (in designing a lattice the constraints correspond to the data).
Because of this commonality of design, the Tao program was developed to reduce the time needed to develop working programs. Tao is a machine independent program that implements the essential ingredients needed to solve simulation problems. To make the connection, Tao uses configuration input files that can be tailored to specific machines. Additionally, Tao has been built to be easily customizable so that extending Tao to solve new and different problems is relatively straight forward.
The Tao manual covers the physics, input file formats, and programing Tao extensions.
At Wilson Lab, each software release contains an executable. See the Local_Setup page on how to run Tao.
To get example input files for Tao use the command:
svn co https://accserv.lepp.cornell.edu/svn/trunk/src/tao/programThis will create a sub-directory called program in your local directory which contains the input files. Go to that directory and run Tao:
cd program $ACC_EXE/tao