OpenCMISS is a project for the re-engineering of the CMISS computational engine.

CMISS

CMISS is an interactive computer program for Continuum Mechanics, Image analysis, Signal processing and System Identification. It provides a mathematical modelling environment that allows the application of finite element analysis, boundary element and collocation techniques to a variety of complex bioengineering problems.

CMISS consists of two main components, cmgui and cm. cmgui is a graphical front end with advanced 3D display and modelling capabilities. It is the open source project written in C/C++. cm is a computational backend that may be run remotely on powerful workstations or supercomputers. cm is developed under Fortran 77 and has some licensing limitations.

Shared Memory Computing vs Distributed Memory Computing

cm uses OpenMP for shared memory computing. A shared memory system is relatively easy to program since all processors share a single view of data and the communication between processors can be as fast as memory accesses to a shared location. However, the CPU-to-memory connection will eventually become a bottleneck.

Distributed memory systems have increased CPU and memory scalibility compared to shared memory systems, but are much harder to program. The MPI standard is used for message passing.

Objectives of OpenCMISS

OpenCMISS is re-engineering of CMISS cm component. It is intended to give a library based approach to enable use in multiple applications. It is developed under Fortan 95 and Modular, easily extendable and programmable. It will be integrated with MPI to provide modular, easily extendable and programmable code which is applicable for either MPI based distributed system, OpenMP based shared memory system and/or serial code. It will be open sourced.