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 are fully supported only on Linux/Unix. The next release will add 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.

Different types of Chaste users

Cardiac Executable

'XML Users' of the cardiac executable should:

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 we recommend using Eclipse as the IDE. 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.

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 sending an email to chaste-users-subscribe@…. 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.

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