What is GarlicSim?

GarlicSim is an ambitious open-source project in the field of scientific computing, specifically computer simulations. It attempts to redefine the way that people think about computer simulations, making a new standard for how simulations are created and used.

GarlicSim is a platform for writing, running and analyzing simulations. It is general enough to handle any kind of simulation: Physics, game theory, epidemic spread, electronics, etc.

When you're writing a simulation, about 90% of the code you write is boilerplate; Code that isn't directly related to the phenomenon you're simulating, but is necessary for your simulation to work. The aim of GarlicSim is to write that 90% of the code once and for all, and to do it well, so you could concentrate on the important 10%.

GarlicSim defines a new format for simulations. It's called a simulation package, and often abbreviated as simpack. For example, say you are interested in simulating the interaction of hurricane storms. It is up to you to write a simpack for this type of simulation. The simpack is simply a Python package which defines a few special functions according to the GarlicSim simpack API, the most important function being the step function.

The beauty is that since so many simulation types can fit into this mold of a simpack, the tools that GarlicSim provides can be used across all of these different domains. Once you plug your own simpack into GarlicSim, you're ready to roll. All the tools that GarlicSim provides will work with your simulation.

Additionally, GarlicSim will eventually be shipped with a standard library of simpacks for common simulations, that the user may find useful to use as-is, or with his own modifications.

GarlicSim itself is written in pure Python. The speed of simulations is mostly dependent on the simpack's performance - So it is possible to use C code in a simpack to make things faster.

Roadmap

Present:

GarlicSim is at version 0.6.3, which is an alpha release. At this experimental stage of the project, backward compatibility will not be maintained. However, I will be available to assist in issues related to backward compatibility.

Near future:

The next release will be GarlicSim 0.7. Planned features: Crunching on the cloud using PiCloud and a Mayavi-based physics simpack.

Future:

By January 1st, 2014, a polished and user-friendly version of GarlicSim will be available. This version will be usable by the general population of scientists and engineers, including those that don't know Python.

Core and GUI

The GarlicSim project contains three packages: garlicsim, which is the core logic, garlicsim_lib, which is a collection of simpacks, and garlicsim_wx, which is the wxPython-based GUI.

They are all distributed under the LGPL2.1 license.