Digitalization often emphasizes data accessibility, but the liberation of algorithms and their implementation is equally essential. Our focus on the development of free open-source software over the past decades reflects our belief that this approach is crucial for advancing computational methods and accelerating innovation and technology transfer between academia and industry.
SINTEF's staff comprises of permanent researchers with extensive expertise in both research and professional software development, making us well-suited to spearhead the development and maintenance of community software projects.
Use of open-source software as a basis for our research has the following advantages for our clients:
- accelerates transfer of ideas and their promotion to a higher technology-readiness level
- builds confidence through reproducible computational science
- enables collaborative teams to spend more time on relevant problems
- promotes innovation and fosters cooperation/collaboration across organizations
- simplifies end-user customization
For ourselves, open-software software has the following advantages:
- it has enabled us to built our international reputation as market leaders
- it is a key to world-wide collaboration and cooperation
- it provides us with a flexible software infrastructure that enables work for demanding clients
- release of free open-source software is in line with current open-access policies from public funding agencies
- has proved to be a very efficient approach to preserve IP/expertise and ensure cross-fertilization across projects
Examples of open-source softwares/projects
We have a range of open-source projects implemented in C, C++, Julia, MATLAB, and Python:
- BattMo - a flexible framework for building fully coupled electrochemical-thermal simulations of electrochemical devices using 1D, 2D, or 3D geometries. BattMo is implemented in MATLAB and builds on MRST. See also: batterymodel.com
- MATLAB Reservoir Simulation Toolbox (MRST) - a unique research and prototyping tool used all over the world, e.g., as evidenced by more than 200 master/doctoral theses and 600 external journal and proceedings papers (per May 2023).
- OPM Flow - a reservoir simulator aimed at commercial application. Used by Equinor for asset models on the Norwegian Continental Shelf.
- Jutul - an experimental Julia framework for fully differentiable multi-physics simulators. Extensive functionality for reservoir simulation (JutulDarcy.jl) and computational electrochemistry (BattMo.jl).
- IFEM - an object-oriented toolbox for implementing isogeometric finite element solvers for linear and nonlinear partial differential equations.
- GPU Ocean - a computational framework for predicting the drift trajectories of oil spills, ice bergs, and other floating objects to protect the marine environment and for safe offshore operations using CUDA enabled GPUs. (See also old project pages and havvarsel.no.)
- GoTools - a collection of C++ libraries related to computational geometry, targeting computer aided design (CAD), isogeometric analysis, and big data approximation and analysis.
- OpenQuantumComputing - open source code for quantum computing software for noisy intermediate scale quantum (NISQ) computers
See the GitHub page for the Mathematics and Cybernetics department for a more complete listing.