Loading configurations

There are a handful of gauge configuration formats on the market, including

• MILC

• NERSC

• ILDG, which you can learn about here and here

It is sometimes convenient to have the ability to read these configurations in Python. For instance lots of machine learning code is in Python. It may also be easier to use Python to write short scripts to convert between one format and another. To this end, we have implemented latqcdtools/interfaces/confReader.py.

At the moment it only reads NERSC format, but one can easily extend this, by following the example of the NERSCReader class, which inherits from a more general confReader class. If you want to implement your own class, please have it inherit from confReader as well.

A NERSCReader object is easily instantiated with just information about \(N_s\) and \(N_\tau\) as

reader = NERSCReader(Ns=8, Nt=4)

One then loads a gauge field using

gauge = reader.readConf('nersc.l8t4b3360')

You can access the link at site \((0,0,1,1)\) pointing in the 0-direction through

gauge.getLink(0,0,1,1,0)