MLOC Installation
Operating System
Recent development and most usage of mloc has been done under Apple’s Mac OS X and MacOS operating systems, but it has been installed under several Linux distributions successfully, and should be rather easy to port to any Unix-like operating system. MLOC is compiled from Fortran source code, runs in a terminal window and uses only a few basic shell commands. All plotting is done through the Generic Mapping Tools (GMT) and plotting can be turned off by the user if GMT is not available.
Hardware Requirements
Disk storage requirements for the program itself, supporting data files and utility programs are modest. The basic distribution will require ~135 MB on disk. If managed by GMT (version 6) the ETOPO1 digital elevation model requires about 270 MB of storage; if the user hosts the corresponding ~.grd file in order to plot topography/bathymetry under GMT5, the storage requirement is ~1 GB. The data files for a typical cluster of ~100 events are unlikely to exceed a few MB in size, but each run of mloc produces many output files, some of which are fairly large. If all files from all runs are retained (recommended practice), a cluster directory can easily expand to several hundred MB. On the other hand those files compress well.
Demands on RAM and CPU power go up quickly with the number of events included in a cluster. Current desktop and laptop machines with reasonably high specifications (e.g. a mid-range MacBook Pro) can handle clusters with up to about 200 events before the execution times become unacceptable. The maximum number of events is set at 200 in the code, but it can be easily changed. The code has never been optimized to take advantage of multiple processors or multiple cores.
With careful arrangement of windows mloc can be used effectively on a 15-inch laptop with a good screen, but a large external monitor is preferable.
Installation Links
The following links cover all aspects of obtaining and installing the software components for mloc: