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The Messaging Object Oriented Simulation Environment, MOOSE, is designed to handle large complex simulations especially in biology. Its initial specific design goal is to handle the functionality of the old GENESIS base code, in a manner which permits backward compatibility. It already does some of this, and is smaller, cleaner and faster. It is portable and runs on UNIX and Windows. It is being developed in the lab of Upi Bhalla at NCBS, Bangalore.
Relation to the old GENESIS project:
MOOSE has no old GENESIS code except for the SLI parser definition. It is
completely rewritten in C++ and has a different architecture. It
considerably enhances the core concepts of messaging and objects, but as a
superset, so backward compatibility is possible.
Relation to the new GENESIS project:
MOOSE is designed to handle the base code, parser, numerical and
parallelization functionality. The new GENESIS project, among other
things, will look at user interfaces, tutorials and educational tie-ups.
The overall project will provide for backward compatibility.
Licensing
MOOSE is licensed using the LGPL version 2.1. It uses the following extra
components as optional but important extra libraries:
- FLTK (Graphics library) : Licensed LGPL 2.0
- Merseinne Twister (random number generator): BSD style license.
- SLI : Currently GENESIS license.
Current status
MOOSE is alpha code. It handles almost all of the kinetics
functionality and some of the compartmental modeling functionality (enough
to do one of Dieter Jaeger's big GP cell models). An beta release is
planned for the WAM-BAMM*05 meeting, for developers to start to play with it.