Getting started with Chaste
There are two ways in which Chaste may be used:
- the cardiac executable — a standalone binary for running cardiac electro-physiological simulations, based on an XML configuration file;
- the C++ source code — which needs to be compiled but gives access to the full power of Chaste, and can be used to run cardiac electro-physiological and electro-mechanical simulations, discrete tissue simulations (including intestinal crypt simulations), and more.
For initially getting to grips with the Chaste source code or cardiac executable, we suggest you look at the following resources.
- For both executable and source code users: extensive guide material is made available with each release. This contains a comprehensive guide to setting up and running Chaste, including example simulations and code tutorials, extra installation instructions, reference material, code documentation, and more. The guides for release 2021.1 can be found here.
- For cardiac executable users: the README.txt file and the files in the docs folder of the download.
There is further documentation contained on the Chaste wiki. Note however that the contents of the wiki will generally refer to the latest development version of the Chaste code, which may not match a release version. Static copies of relevant pages are taken corresponding to each Chaste release. The high level user documentation can be found here and comprehensive API documentation here.
Getting help
Finally, you may ask any questions on the Chaste users' mailing list. You can subscribe to the list by following these instructions. Public list archives are available.
We have also created a short survey in order to receive feedback from users.
