Section I, Introduction

About

Swarm, Seismic Wave Analysis and Real-time Monitor, is a program to analyze seismic waveforms in real-time. Further, Swarm can be used as a much lower cost, more functional replacement to the traditional helicorder.

Seamlessly integrated into its rich user interface, Swarm has many commonly used tools for visualizing seismic waveforms quickly and effectively: frequency spectra plots, spectrograms, filtering, easy navigation, etc.

Swarm was developed at the Alaska Volcano Observatory by Dan Cervelli in July and August, 2004.

System Requirements

Swarm should run on any system with a Java version 1.5 or greater, see Installation and Running, and a graphics display. However, it should be noted that Swarm frequently deals with large quantities of data and does complex calculations on said data, thus, system memory and processor speed will have a large impact on Swarm's execution speed.

Installation and Running

Swarm is written in Java so you will need to have Java installed on your system. Java version 1.5 or greater is required. Please make sure that you have at least this version or else Swarm will not work. The latest versions of Java can be found at the Java Technology page. The Java Runtime Environment, or JRE, is sufficient; you do not need the full Java Software Development Kit, SDK.

After Java is installed you are ready to download and install Swarm. First, download the latest version here. This zip or tar contains everything you need to run Swarm. Everything in the zip or tar is located under the directory "swarm/" so you can safely unzip it wherever you like.

Once you have unzipped or untarred Swarm to a directory of your choosing simply navigate to that directory and run either 'swarm.bat' on Windows, or 'swarm.sh' on other platforms. If you would like to create your own script to start Swarm see the Advanced Topics section.

Bugs

Unfortunately all software has bugs and Swarm is no different. If you find either a bug or an error in this manual please report it to the author, Dan Cervelli.