Gnuplot

Overview

Gnuplot is a command-line driven graphing utility which to allows visualization of mathematical functions and data interactively.

Versions 5.0.2 and 5.2.7 are available.

Restrictions on use

Gnuplot is free to use software, but users should familiarise themselves with the copyright information before using it.

Set up procedure

We now recommend loading modulefiles within your jobscript so that you have a full record of how the job was run. See the example jobscript below for how to do this. Alternatively, you may load modulefiles on the login node and let the job inherit these settings.

Load the modulefile corresponding to your required version:

# Latest version (in the 'tools' group)
module load tools/gcc/gnuplot/5.2.7

# Older version from the DPSF that requires an additional modulefile
module load apps/bioinf apps/gnuplot/5.0.2

Running the application

You may run gnuplot on the login node if processing small datasets. Alternatively, you can run it in an interactive session on a compute node if processing a large dataset. gnuplot can also be run in batch, by running it from your jobscript – typically in the same program that generates a dataset.

Serial batch job submission

Make sure you have the modulefile loaded, have prepared a gnuplot script file containing what you want gnuplot to do, have a dataset file (e.g., a table of numbers) and then create a batch submission script, for example:

#!/bin/bash --login
#$ -cwd               # Job will run from the current directory
                      # Job will inherit current environment settings

# Load your required version
module load tools/gcc/gnuplot/5.2.7

# plot.txt is the plotting script. It will usually load in your dataset file.
gnuplot plot.txt

Submit the jobscript using:

qsub scriptname

where scriptname is the name of your jobscript.

Interactive Usage

It is possible to run gnuplot interactively on a compute node using qrsh. To do so please run the following commands on the login node:

module load tools/gcc/gnuplot/5.2.7
qrsh -l short -V -cwd gnuplot

Further info

Detailed information about how to use gnuplot can be found within the software. At the gnuplot command line type:

• help
• help for example: help plot bezier

The Gnuplot website contains documentation, FAQs, demos and tutorials.