Getting Started

Firstly, new users need to decide whether they want to use the cardiac executable, a standalone compiled executable for running cardiac electro-physiological simulations, or the source code, which can be used to run cardiac electro-physiological and electro-mechanical simulations, discrete tissue simulations (including intestinal crypt simulations), and more.

Note that release 3.1 and earlier of Chaste were fully supported only on Linux/Unix. Release 3.2 added full support for Mac OS X, and partial support for Windows (only for the cell-based functionality, not cardiac modelling). The recommended route for unsupported systems is to install Chaste on a virtual machine running Ubuntu Linux.

Cardiac Executable

'XML Users' of the cardiac executable should:

• download the executable from the ​downloads page of the public website;
• go to ChasteGuides and follow the relevant instructions for running simulations.

Source Code

Using the source code is slightly more complicated. Firstly, you need to decide whether to use a release, or to check out the latest development version of the code (new 'Code Developers' should do the latter, 'Code Users' can do this if they wish, but using a release to start with is recommended). Perusing the release notes and latest news can give you a good overview of what features are in each release, and what has been added since.

In either case, various things need to be installed: Chaste uses scons as the project builder (rather than make); the third party dependencies include MPI, PETSc, HDF5 and others; and if you wish to do programming yourself, then we recommend using Eclipse as the development environment. All of these need to be installed. The easiest method is to use the ​Ubuntu Linux distribution, for which a package is available - see InstallGuides/UbuntuPackage.

• Go to the InstallGuide and follow the instructions on installing dependencies (or use the installation guide supplied with the release).
• For Code Users working with a release:
  • Download the latest source release from the ​downloads page if not using Ubuntu (Ubuntu can fetch this for you).
• For Code Developers (or Code Users working with the development version of the code):
  • Reading ChasteGuides/ExternalDeveloperGuide is highly recommended, and then checking out a copy of the development code as per ChasteGuides/AccessCodeRepository.
• Go to ChasteGuides and read and run the tutorials on the kind of simulation you wish to run.

Getting Help

For general discussion about Chaste, and questions regarding usage, we provide the Chaste users' mailing list. You can subscribe to the list by ​following these instructions. Public ​list archives are available.

Bug reports and feature requests may be submitted using this website; please register for an account in order to do so.

This Website

This is the Chaste developers' Trac system, which provides a wiki, access to the source repository, and ticketing system. If you wish to submit or comment on public bug reports and feature requests, please register for an account.