E-Cell 4 Development
This page describes the development efforts for E-Cell 4.
E-Cell 4 seeks to extend E-Cell 3 by adding several new features, notably dynamic model structure and spatial representation.
Design documents
Template for new feature proposals
Etc.
The next generation of E-Cell simulation technology is currently in the design phase. This project is led by Koichi Takahashi, The Molecular Sciences Institute.
E-Cell 4 simulation engine planned features
Main focuses in this new version will include:
- Generic representation of space
- Support for particle, lattice, and compartment space representations.
- Mixed uses of different spatial representations in a model.
- Dynamic model structure
- Creation and deletion of objects during the simulation.
- Integrating Moleculizer technology for efficient modeling of pathways involving multi-protein complexes.
- Support for large-scale parallel computation
E-Cell 4 planned technical changes
The following changes in software architecture, used components and coding styles are currently planned. This list will grow as time goes.
- New object model for space.
- Support for array data type, and a good memory manager.
- Rename System to Entity?
- New Logging architecture.
- GUI: pyGtk to wxPython? Two reasons; a) portability, b) 3D visualization through VTK widgets.
- PyEcs: from flat, functional API to object-orientation. This is related to adding support for dynamic model structure to the core. (also: Do we still need libemc layer?)
- Slight changes in the coding standards.
