Revision as of 12:30, 15 March 2017

Application Details

• Description : IDL, short for Interactive Data Language, is a programming language used for data analysis. It is popular in particular areas of science, such as astronomy, atmospheric physics and medical imaging. IDL shares a common syntax with PV-Wave and originated from the same codebase, though the languages have subsequently diverged in detail.
• Versions : 8.4
• Module names : idl/8.4
• License: University of Hull Engineering department, restricted by physics department

Usage Examples

IDL Programs

Below is an example of a very basic IDL program called helloworld.pro

; helloworld.pro
pro helloworld,what
  print,'HELLO ',what
end

And the corresponding main.pro program

; main.pro
pro main
  helloworld,'WORLD'
end

Batch Script

#!/bin/bash
#SBATCH --job-name=sayhello
#SBATCH --output=slurm.out
#SBATCH --error=slurm.err
#SBATCH --partition=compute

idl -e main

Batch Submission

[username@login01 ~]$ sbatch idl.job
Submitted batch job 289543

Interactive Mode

IDL can be invoked an interactive mode as below:

[user@login01 ~]$ module load idl/8.4
[pysdlb@login01 ~]$ idl
IDL Version 8.4 (linux x86_64 m64). (c) 2014, Exelis Visual Information Solutions, Inc.
Installation number: 406930.
Licensed for use by: STFC - Dept of Physics

IDL>

Further information

• http://www.exelisvis.co.uk
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exelis_Visual_Information_Solutions
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDL_(programming_language)