Well, it very much depends on the nature of the experiment and the type of data that it has produced, but there are some typical methods that we often used.
Computers are good at handling numbers and the data that the program produces is just a huge amount of numbers. For a medium size experiment we may have 10 Mb of data, equivalent to 2.5 million numbers, for each time step that the program saved the solution to the disk. How many words do you read per minute? 100, 200, 300 ...1000? Well, it will possibly be somewhere in that range. If we assume that you read 1000 words per minute, which is much faster than I can read, then it will take you 2500 minutes or nearly 42 hours to read all off the numbers.
We therefore have to use different techniques to extract the important information in the data. Here the computer is naturally helping us again. We can use special programs to visualise structures in the data set and statistical analysis to obtain easily used numbers for comparisons between different experiments and observations.
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