Hi PaLaBoS Team,
Congratulations on founding Flowkit Ltd. And thanks for providing a picture of the future of PaLaBoS. I have a few questions though:
While it has been clearly stated that PaLaBoS will remain open-source, is it (or atleast a branch of it) also going to remain a community code? For example, can individual researchers still submit new contributions to the PaLaBoS code? Or is OpenLB going to be the sole community version of the code for people to submit additions to?
Will there be any synchronization between the PaLaBoS and OpenLB codes in the future? Or are the two codes going to go off in completely different directions from this point on?
What, if any, are the differences between the latest releases of PaLaBoS vs OpenLB?
Thank you for your questions, especially the first one which we’ve been asked on several occasions.
Yes, Palabos is a community code and will remain one, in the same sense as it has always been. The global picture with Palabos’ community interaction is the following. We’re glad to interact with whoever wishes to extend Palabos, to help with advice, and to consider inclusion of these extensions into Palabos. Direct access to the SVN repository is however only granted to the inner core of Palabos developers: external contributions are subject to a prior review process (or an iterative interaction with the code developer), in order to make sure it matches the standards of Palabos with respect to ease of use, accuracy of results, quality of code, etc. In general, if you wish to develop extensions (and want them to be included into the official branch), we recommend that you contact us at an early stage to avoid wasting efforts unnecessarily.
We feel that with this approach we can provide a quality guarantee for Palabos which is to everyone’s advantage. To provide an example of the community interaction we’re currently having with Palabos, let me point out the newest release we are preparing (and which hopefully will be out before Christmas…). It will contain an implementation of a very recently published LB model (http://arxiv.org/abs/1111.2142). This implementation was developed, tested and validated in collaboration with the authors of this preprint, and the result of this interaction is certainly of everyones benefit.
So, to answer your question, we do encourage, and are looking for community interaction/contribution. By the way, another very useful way to contribute to the Palabos project is to write tutorials targeted to your specific domain of application, to help more people get started with Palabos.
Concerning question 2 and 3, we do not synchronize any of the Palabos code with other open source projects. Also, we are not in the best position to point out what the exact differences between projects are.