(r3) OSSoftware < GridAndHPC

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---+++ Open Source/ Free Software Alternatives

-- Main.RobAllan - 20 Apr 2010

<img alt="" src="http://www.grids.ac.uk/Sakai/Images/new.small.gif" /> 
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/opensource/library/os-newlight/index.html?ca=dnw-1116&ca=dth-o

A related page on cluster software stacks is on the  [[http://wiki.rcs.manchester.ac.uk/hpc-sig/Members%20Area/SoftwareStackSurvey][HPC-SIG Wiki]].

This section is to collect information about open source or free software which is widely used as an alternative to commercial or proprietary offerings. It has a focus on software relevant for research and HPC systems. There are other sites for more general software, for instance see http://www.osalt.com and http://alternativeto.net. We will split this collection into categories off the links below. Mike Croucher's blog is at http://www.walkingrandomly.com/. See also the Open Science Project http://www.openscience.org.

A lot of general information can be found via the Open Directory Project http://www.dmoz.org/Science and Wikipedia http://www.wikipedia.org.
There are also a number of books on this subject, e.g. see [[http://books.google.co.uk/books?q=evaluation+of+open+source+scientific+software&source=in&ei=9hceS67tAtuQjAee68muCw&sa=X&oi=book_group&ct=title&cad=bottom-3results&resnum=11&ved=0CC4QsAMwCg][Google Books]]

A report on the breakout session we held at [[http://www.cse.scitech.ac.uk/disco/mew20/index.html][MEW20]] on “Open-source alternatives to commercial scientific software” is available here: http://bit.ly/8SulTc .

Note many of the free packages are included with Linux distributions such as Gentoo.

   * [[OSAlg][Algebra Packages]] - and general maths
   * [[OSCompChem][Computational Chemistry]]
   * [[OSMolDyn][Molecular Dynamics]]
   * [[OSBiology][Computational Biology]] and bio-informatics
   * [[OSPhysics][Physics and Astronomy]] 
   * [[OSEngineering][Engineering]] - structural, fluid and electronic
   * [[OSCompStats][Computational Statistics]] - including econometrics
   * [[OSGIS][Geographical Information Systems]] - and geo-sciences
   * [[http://www.grids.ac.uk/NWGrid/ABMS][Agent Based Modelling and Simulation]]

*Other relevant Links*

   * [[OSPlotting][Graph Plotting, etc.]] including networks, flow charts...
   * [[http://arxiv.org/abs/0903.3971][Astronomy]] - actually a paper discussing the issues with developing Open Source
   * [[http://www.ccp.ac.uk][Collaborative Computational Projects]] - develop and share software packages in many science domains
   * [[OSSciViz][Scientific Visualisation]] - some packages listed here http://tyne.dl.ac.uk/twiki/bin/view/GridAndHPC/PowerWall
   * [[http://www.ncsu.edu/it/open_source/][General IT]] - a compendium from North Carolina State University
Topic revision: r3 - 31 Aug 2010 - RobAllan