AboutDocuments

SimTKcore exists as a separate project to provide 'one stop shopping' for SimTK Core software and support, although the software is actually developed as a set of interdependent projects. SimTK 1.0 was released in March 2008, SimTK 2.0 in December, 2009.


Prior to June, 2011 this project was used to distribute the Simbios-developed Simbody and Molmodel packages in the SimTK biosimulation toolkit. These are now distributed separately from the Simbody and Molmodel projects (https://simtk.org/home/simbody, https://simtk.org/home/molmodel). Please use those projects instead of this one.

The other major component of SimTK is the GPU-accelerated molecular dynamics package OpenMM, see https://simtk.org/home/openmm if you are interested.

The text below refers to the pre-June, 2011 packaging and has been superseded as described above.

SimTK Core subprojects This SimTK Core project collects together all the binaries needed for the various SimTK Core subprojects. These include Simbody, Molmodel, Simmath (including Ipopt), Simmatrix, CPodes, SimTKcommon, and Lapack. See the individual projects for descriptions.

SimTK overview
SimTK brings together in a robust, convenient, open source form the collection of highly-specialized technologies necessary to building successful physics-based simulations of biological structures. These include: strict adherence to an important set of abstractions and guiding principles, robust, high-performance numerical methods, support for developing and sharing physics-based models, and careful software engineering.

Accessible High Performance Computing

We believe that a primary concern of simulation scientists is performance, that is, speed of computation. We seek to build valid, approximate models using classical physics in order to achieve reasonable run times for our computational studies, so that we can hope to learn something interesting before retirement. In the choice of SimTK technologies, we are focused on achieving the best possible performance on hardware that most researchers actually have. In today's practice, that means commodity multiprocessors and small clusters.

The difference in performance between the best methods and the do-it-yourself techniques most people use can be astounding—easily an order of magnitude or more. The growing set of SimTK Core libraries seeks to provide the best implementation of the best-known methods for widely used computations such as:
Linear algebra, numerical integration and Monte Carlo sampling, multibody (internal coordinate) dynamics, molecular force field evaluation, nonlinear root finding and optimization. All SimTK Core software is in the form of C++ APIs, is thread-safe, and quietly exploits multiple CPUs when they are present.

The resulting pre-built binaries are available for download and immediate use.

Citation: Any work that uses SimTK Core (including Simbody) should cite the following paper: Jeanette P. Schmidt, Scott L. Delp, Michael A. Sherman, Charles A. Taylor,Vijay S. Pande, Russ B. Altman, "The Simbios National Center: SystemsBiology in Motion", Proceedings of the IEEE, special issue on Computational System Biology. Volume 96, Issue 8:1266 - 1280. (2008)

Related Projects

The project owner recommends the following other projects:

Molmodel: SimTK molecular modeling API

Simbody: Multibody Physics API

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