Abstract
A case study of open-source (OS) development of the computational research software MFIX, used for multiphase computational fluid dynamics simulations, is presented here. The verification and validation steps required for constructing modern computational software and the advantages of OS development in those steps are discussed. The infrastructure used for enabling the OS development of MFIX is described. The impact of OS development on computational research and education in gas-solids flow, as well as the dissemination of information to other areas such as geophysical and volcanology research, is demonstrated. This study shows that the advantages of OS development were realized in the case of MFIX: verification by many users, which enhances software quality; the use of software as a means for accumulating and exchanging information; the facilitation of peer review of the results of computational research.
Highlights
Open-source (OS) software is ubiquitous; knowingly or unknowingly, the present reader is likely to be making use of OS software embedded in a gadget or device while reading this paper
It is not certain that the advantages of OS development demonstrated in application software such as Linux and Apache can be realized in the case of computational research software
This study shows that the advantages of OS development have been realized in the case of Multiphase Flow with Interphase eXchanges (MFIX), and shows the additional benefit of facilitating the peer review of computer code used for generating results that are published in journal articles
Summary
Open-source (OS) software is ubiquitous; knowingly or unknowingly, the present reader is likely to be making use of OS software embedded in a gadget or device while reading this paper. Its main feature is that users have access to the source code, and they may study or augment the code to change the software’s functionality One year before this term was coined in 1997, a lesser-known term, Bazaar development process, was proposed to label the community style software development facilitated by the internet. The discussion in this case study pertains only to software used for computational research; that is, software used for the development of mathematical models and numerical techniques.
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