Beatbox Quick Start Guide


Table of Contents


Beatbox, briefly

Beatbox is a unified cardiac simulation environment. It provides:

Who should read this guide

This quick-start guide is for users who wish to start using Beatbox in their cardiac simulation project. This quick-start provides an easy to read and follow document using which the user can start using Beatbox immediately.

A full manual is available HERE.

A full manual for making BBG files is available HERE.

Pointers to useful tutorials

If you are new to Unix like environments, electrophysiology, cardiology, or anything to do with cardiac (or electrophysiology) simulations, then read the following tutorials.

Prerequisites

Beatbox is a Unix-based piece of software. Thus, it will also work on Mac (tested on Leopard and Snow Leopard OS X) and standard Linux: tested on Fedora and Red Hat Linux, though any other Linux distribution should work. The preferred working shell for Beatbox is the bash shell. This choice of shell will assist in easily executing the examples described below. For larger non-interactive simulations, you may wish to choose tcsh or bash.

Beatbox requires gcc (sequential) and mpicc (MPI parallel) C compilers. Beatbox also requires standard math and X11 libraries.

To obtain the Beatbox source code off the project repository, you need a client program for Subversion (SVN). You can also obtain a copy of the distribution source code from the authors.

Obtaining Beatbox Source Code and Examples

These are a standard installation procedures assuming your computer satisfies requirements stated previously. These instruction assume that you are using bash or a similar command-line shell.

Releases

To obtain a BeatBox release, download the most recent tarball from the repository, which at the moment of writing this is at http://empslocal.ex.ac.uk/people/staff/vnb262/software/BeatBox/ , and unpack it. Chose the place at your convenience. It could be your home directory or any other directory in your space. Say, if you downloaded the file beatbox-1.1-417.tar.gz into your $HOME directory, then you can do

cd $HOME
gunzip -c beatbox-1.1-417.tar.gz | tar xvf -
cd beatbox-1.1-417
and you will be in what we shall call the "beatbox package directory".

Development versions

Developers and more experienced users may prefer to get the most recent versions of the package under development. For that, a Subversion (SVN) client should be working on your computer. Methods of obtaining SVN are detailed on their web page:

Your flavour of Linux may also support updating the SVN package using yum, apt-get, or similar.

Assuming you have SVN client on, you can create the beatbox directory and download the package into it using the following commands:

cd $HOME
mkdir beatbox
cd beatbox
svn co --username=anonymous --password=beatbox https://beatbox-trac.epcc.ed.ac.uk/svn/trunk .
cd beatbox
and you will be in the BeatBox package directory.

Note the '.' at the end of the svn command. If you are already familiar with SVN you may note that this will given you a read-only copy of the directory; if you would like to contribute to the package, you are welcome to contact the authors (see below).

Compiling and Installing Beatbox

For the impatient: the basic commands for compiling on local machines (including standard MPI clusters) as well as on HECToR (the UK National Supercomputing facility) have been collected into two bash shell scripts. To check if your download contains these install scripts, and that their permissions are execute permissions, use the following command in the BeatBox package directory:

ls -l bbx_compile*sh

which should produce something like the following:

-rwxrwxr-x. 1 user group 195 Aug  3 17:01 bbx_compile_hector.sh
-rwxrwxr-x. 1 user group  77 Aug 10 17:15 bbx_compile_local.sh
Simply running these shell scripts from the BeatBox package directory will compile and install Beatbox, correspondingly on Hector:
./bbx_compile_hector.sh
or on a typical ("local") computer:
./bbx_compile_local.sh
Note that these scripts will install the executables into $HOME/bin; naturally, for this to work, that directory have to exist.

Details and variations:


Copyright © (2010-2012) Vadim Biktashev, Alexander Karpov,Irina Biktasheva, Ross McFarlane;
Copyright © 2012Sanjay Kharche
This file is part of Beatbox.
Sanjay.Kharche@liverpool.ac.uk
Last modified: Thu Mar 28 12:26:52 GMT 2013