SCI Research: SCIRun/BioPSE/Uintah - Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute

SCIRun / BioPSE / Uintah

SCIRun is a multifunctional problem solving environment that can be best described as a computational workbench by which the user can "close the loop." All aspects of the modeling, simulation, and visualization processes are linked, controlled graphically within the context of a single application program. Creating an integrated problem solving environment for scientific computing involves many significant elements: representing mathematical and geometrical models; computational solution of the governing equations and visualization of models and results--all within an efficient, parallel software environment. By tackling such a large integrated systems approach, the SCI Institute draws upon its multidisciplinary approach to science and research in geometric modeling, simulation, scientific visualization and software environments.

SCIRun, which began development in 1992, was the original implementation of the computational framework. Since then, SCIRun and its computational workbench infrastructure have been the origin of many significant application-specific projects. The two major examples are the DOE sponsored Uintah system (currently operated within the CSAFE project), and the NIH sponsored BioPSE system. The target applications of the Uintah project are combustion, computational fluid dynamics, and mechanical modeling which is implemented on large-scale, and distributed with shared memory architectures. The primary goal of the BioPSE project was to create software for geometric modeling, simulation, and visualization for solving bioelectric field problems. However, the secondary goal of the SCIRun/BioPSE system was to make source code for these problem solving environments publicly available to the scientific community.

To realize these two significant projects, the SCIRun infrastructure itself has required significant reorganization, extension, and enhancement. Even with these recent changes, SCIRun remains both the core infrastructure of the problem solving environments and the name of the entire ensemble of software. Thus, a user may install and operate the core SCIRun software and also augment its functionality with one or more of the "packages," such as BioPSE. The SCI Institute anticipates that the collection of packages will grow, as the advantages of the SCIRun infrastructure becomes available to scientists and engineers of all disciplines.

The software is free of charge to researchers, students, and educators. Registration is required for download. Simply follow the online instructions to access the software. We have provided online documentation including a tutorial to ease the process of installing and operating this premiere research tool.

SCIRun PSEs are available as source for Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows XP, as well as executable binary for Windows XP from the SCI Software Archive.