Open Source/ Free Software Alternatives

-- RobAllan - 20 Apr 2010

Main page now on 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 Google Books

A report on the breakout session we held at 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.

• Algebra Packages - and general maths
• Computational Chemistry
• Molecular Dynamics
• Computational Biology and bio-informatics
• Physics and Astronomy
• Engineering - structural, fluid and electronic
• Computational Statistics - including econometrics
• Geographical Information Systems - and geo-sciences
• Agent Based Modelling and Simulation

Other relevant Links

• Graph Plotting, etc. including networks, flow charts...
• Astronomy - actually a paper discussing the issues with developing Open Source
• Collaborative Computational Projects - develop and share software packages in many science domains
• Scientific Visualisation - some packages listed here http://tyne.dl.ac.uk/twiki/bin/view/GridAndHPC/PowerWall
• General IT - a compendium from North Carolina State University