First Annual OSIRIS Users and Developers Workshop:

On September 18 to 20, the first annual OSIRIS Users and Developers Workshop was held at UCLA. The aims of the workshop were to introduce users to the new features and design of our plasma simulation code OSIRIS 4.0, to allow OSIRIS users to share experiences and discuss best practices, to identify useful test and demonstration problems, to discuss how to transition from being a user to an active developer, and to identify areas for near term software improvements and a community strategy for carrying out necessary developments.

There were over 60 attendees from the U.S., Europe, and Asia, with widely ranging experiences and expertise. It was a great success, with many discussions and new collaborations and friendships.

The agenda, as well as copies of many of the talks, can be found on our Presentations page. A summary of the workshop will be posted soon.

The OSIRIS Users and Developers Workshop will be held annually and alternate between IST in Portugal and UCLA in the U.S. With an active and growing user base that includes over 25 research groups and over 100 users worldwide, the continued success of OSIRIS will benefit greatly from maintaining active community engagement and involvement. Not only is OSIRIS a premiere particle-in-cell simulation tool, it is also a continuously evolving and very complex piece of software. We recognize that it is essential to communicate effectively with our user base and to develop tools which allow us to effectively manage feature development, code dissemination, and code documentation.

If you are interested in becoming a part of the OSIRIS community as a user and/or developer please contact us at picksc.org@gmail.com.

PICKSC Workshop on Enabling Software Interoperability:

The first PICKSC workshop was held at UCLA from Sept 22-24, 2014. The UCLA Particle-in-Cell (PIC) and Kinetic Simulation Software Center (PICKSC) hosted a workshop on enabling software interoperability within the PIC community. We invited the primary developers of about a dozen major PIC codes used in the study of Laser Plasma Interactions (LPI), as well as a few developers from other areas. The LPI community shares intellectual ideas about simulations effectively, but has rarely shared the software itself. There is no large community code. Almost all the developers we invited accepted, indicating a strong interest in this topic.

More information can be found here on the News Item about the workshop.