Hello,
there are plenty of codes on the net.. commercial and open-source.
Generally it ends up like: PhD-students develop some promising open-source code. Projects can be funded, a start-up may be started and this is the end of the open-source code. Since no community has grown on this code. Probably the Comsol software has been born like this. Or the Student gets its title, and the code falls asleep.
Why isn't there a central place to coordinate al these openEMS, openFOAM(-extra), FreeCAD, Cluster-DEM, openCASCADE/SALOME (at the limit believed to what open-source should be) and many more?
Lack of homepage maintainer? No academic publications to live on? No but probably a good reputation to earn.
Thanks
Really good point that you made there, Lukas. I agree with Agnieszka that the major reason why it doesn't happen that we get really get good open source simulation code (not only for multi physics simulation) is that people from different branches don't work together.
About ten years ago I managed and directed a huge research program in Germany funded by Fraunhofer with 3.5 million Euros the purpose of which was explicitly to develop Multiscale (or multi physics) simulation software. 9 research institutions and more than 30 scientists and engineers were involved in this and the idea was to have a product in the end that can be used by the non-expert. You should think with that huge load of knowledge and intelligent people involved and that much money for three years you should be able to write the best software in the world, but, what, do you think happened? There were lots of arguments among the project "partners" about who really "owns" the software in the end (there was lots of distrust and malevolence) and then there were partners who were only interested in performing a bunch of experiments, not really developing software, albeit they had stated this in the proposal to get the project money in the first place. Then there was a group of scientists of an institute that had some good programmers (C-plusplus, parallelization on their own institute's super computer and GUI stuff), but did not want to share source code with the other partners and only provided binary source code for the others to alpha and beta test it (which pissed the others off: "I am a scientist, not a beta tester for them"). Other groups in the project obviously were not capable to develop software (they were just engineers) and did not to use the project money to hire people who could do it, but instead bought commercial software licences for a garbage "Multiphysics" software from the company Accelrys. I think they spent about 300 k€ for a one year licence only to discover that nothing worked with their "ab-initio" simulations of ceramic structures. The hotline could not help, of course, other than suggesting things like "set this parameter to 1.5 or that one to 3.7". To make a long story short, there were too many people involved, too many different interests, too much dishonesty, too many lies (institutes that just write a proposal to get money somehow with no real interest in the things that are promised in the proposal). In the end, there was no real software package developed that could be used by anyone but an expert and only one of the 9 institutes still has the working code today (and I have no idea whether they are using it for anything). When it became obvious that there wouldn't be a common software tool for all "project partners", the others started to develop their own little packages for their own little purposes and the idea of bringing everything together was basically given up during the project; it just didn't work because there was no common will to really do it. The individual interests of all participants were stronger. It think things like this happen all the time: The next PhD student in a research group starting over with the same developments that were done by five PhD students during the last ten years before him but then abandoned when they had gotten their PhDs and left the group.
Since my experience from this three-year project with 3.5 Million € budget, I only have been developing my own code with capable students every so often and gradually improving the features and the QT-based GUI attached to it. Whenever I think this code is ready for general distribution I will post it on my website, however, then the problem will be to really make it known and get it distributed. For many people working in academia the main reason for distributing a software package for free is mostly building up a reputation until they made it and got their professorship. From this moment on, they usually lose interest in maintaining code because it is often only a means to an end on the rough route to a permanent professorship.
Oh yes, of course.. one of the many.. who will be the one to put all those tools together? a common interface, and API's to inter-exchange...
is there no EU money to get for this purpose?
Daimler knows how to get fundings from the governements. Nice.
Car related, and most of it (profitability oriented) commercial oriented, but a good start. Dassault Systems/EDF at least gives back some of the public money they got in form of "open source" tools.
May be that the "open source" models do not fit always the interests of everybody.
An example for academia... if only openmodelica could gather all the different branches of numerical simulation efforts.
Time will tell. I will advertise for it.
You made a perfect point but I think that the answer to your question is complex and there are many reseons.
From my experience I can tell that the problem is that people from different branches of science/engineering do not cooperate. If you want to make good software - no matter if open-source or commercial - you definitely need a good programmer. Most of good programmers have quite solid basics in physics, mainly electronics and mechanics, but it is not enough to produce a ready-to-use, multi-disciplinary software. That is why they need scientists and engineers who would input their knowledge in a form of analytic formulas and equations. That would happen in a perfect world. Instead we have programmers who work for big companies and code for money. We have programmers who do the open-source but with limited application range. And we have engineers and scientists who develop complex theories but produce poor code... If only we could link all those together...
As I said, people would need to try harder to think outside the box here and seek for interdisciplinary solutions, but this is where the plan fails.
Really good point that you made there, Lukas. I agree with Agnieszka that the major reason why it doesn't happen that we get really get good open source simulation code (not only for multi physics simulation) is that people from different branches don't work together.
About ten years ago I managed and directed a huge research program in Germany funded by Fraunhofer with 3.5 million Euros the purpose of which was explicitly to develop Multiscale (or multi physics) simulation software. 9 research institutions and more than 30 scientists and engineers were involved in this and the idea was to have a product in the end that can be used by the non-expert. You should think with that huge load of knowledge and intelligent people involved and that much money for three years you should be able to write the best software in the world, but, what, do you think happened? There were lots of arguments among the project "partners" about who really "owns" the software in the end (there was lots of distrust and malevolence) and then there were partners who were only interested in performing a bunch of experiments, not really developing software, albeit they had stated this in the proposal to get the project money in the first place. Then there was a group of scientists of an institute that had some good programmers (C-plusplus, parallelization on their own institute's super computer and GUI stuff), but did not want to share source code with the other partners and only provided binary source code for the others to alpha and beta test it (which pissed the others off: "I am a scientist, not a beta tester for them"). Other groups in the project obviously were not capable to develop software (they were just engineers) and did not to use the project money to hire people who could do it, but instead bought commercial software licences for a garbage "Multiphysics" software from the company Accelrys. I think they spent about 300 k€ for a one year licence only to discover that nothing worked with their "ab-initio" simulations of ceramic structures. The hotline could not help, of course, other than suggesting things like "set this parameter to 1.5 or that one to 3.7". To make a long story short, there were too many people involved, too many different interests, too much dishonesty, too many lies (institutes that just write a proposal to get money somehow with no real interest in the things that are promised in the proposal). In the end, there was no real software package developed that could be used by anyone but an expert and only one of the 9 institutes still has the working code today (and I have no idea whether they are using it for anything). When it became obvious that there wouldn't be a common software tool for all "project partners", the others started to develop their own little packages for their own little purposes and the idea of bringing everything together was basically given up during the project; it just didn't work because there was no common will to really do it. The individual interests of all participants were stronger. It think things like this happen all the time: The next PhD student in a research group starting over with the same developments that were done by five PhD students during the last ten years before him but then abandoned when they had gotten their PhDs and left the group.
Since my experience from this three-year project with 3.5 Million € budget, I only have been developing my own code with capable students every so often and gradually improving the features and the QT-based GUI attached to it. Whenever I think this code is ready for general distribution I will post it on my website, however, then the problem will be to really make it known and get it distributed. For many people working in academia the main reason for distributing a software package for free is mostly building up a reputation until they made it and got their professorship. From this moment on, they usually lose interest in maintaining code because it is often only a means to an end on the rough route to a permanent professorship.
wikipedia.org has a special type of page for each type of commercial and open source software, where each available download gets a row in a table. This table has many columns, the brand name, the web site, free or not, feature columns, all needed to make a serious decision on which ones to view first.
"Comparison of " or "List of" is the usual prefix of the page, followed by the type of software. For example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_HTML_editors
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_HTML_editors
Perhaps the one type you are looking has yet to be made? Please do make it. It will grow every year.
I agree with a lot of the discussion here. It is difficult to get scientists and engineers from multiple disciplines to buy into a simulation platform built by computer scientists. The crux of the issue is that everyone believes their physics are different enough that they require specialized software that only an expert in their field can build.
We've been really fortunate to get hundreds of scientists and engineers from many different fields (material science, nuclear engineering, geophysics, chemistry, mining, superconductivity and more) to work with us for the last 6 years to develop the Multiphysics Object Oriented Simulation Environment (MOOSE) framework: http://mooseframework.com
The framework is developed using modern software development principles (object-oriented, agile, continuous integration with rigorous testing) by a team with a computer science background... but it never would have happened without the input we've had from the scientists and engineers who have actually tried to solve real problems with the code. The differences are huge between a toy equation a computer scientist will try to solve and a real world application an engineer wants to study.
This is not a solved problem - we're going to continue to see many attempts at a generic platform for multiphysics computation in the future. The one that ultimately gets it right is definitely going to have to be guided by the needs of actual engineers and scientists that are trying to solve real problems...
CAE Linux is a "place" where various good open source simulation codes are put together: OpenFOAM, Elmer, OpenCASCADE, Salome, etc.
arb is an open-source multi-physics solver. It is a bit different to most in that it is based on the finite volume (rather than finite element) method. Runs on linux and OsX.
http://people.eng.unimelb.edu.au/daltonh/downloads/arb/
If you are good in coding, there are n number of Scipy and Numpy libraries to be used along with Python - you can play with every dimensions of Physics
I know that it's pretty late in this game, but I wanted to let everyone know that, on this question, there's a multiphysics framework called MOOSE coming out of the INL that aims to be the versatile, open-source, multiphysics platform that even includes nutronics and other nuclear verification codes. http://mooseframework.org
sounds good.. didn't catch exactly the CAD behind? libmesh? of what? blender,occ,brlcad,freecad?
It's an analysis software package. I'm not sure what CAD lib they use for it, but if rumors are right, it can accept STEP files for geometry. It's just designed (again, as far as I know--I'm still getting familiar with it) to be the multiphysics analysis piece, not the geometry creation piece (similar to ANSYS).
They use LibMesh, though I'm not sure what CAD.
ORNL also has the ICE front-end to push code into engineering packages on some backend, and a lot of packages have hooks into ICE.
When I learn more, I'll let you know.
The Octave and Matlab Finite Element FEM Toolbox FEATool Multiphysics allows you to couple different pre-defined physics modes and even define your own PDE systems. FEATool features a built-in GUI for CAD preprocessing, solvers, and postprocessing, and also supporting Matlab scripting and external solvers such as FEniCS.
https://www.featool.com/
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