k-Wave

1. Martin
   

   Member
   Joined: Oct '10
   Posts: 2

   Hello, I just started using k-Wave, and I find it incredibly useful. I'm a PhD student working on various ultrasound applications for nondestructive testing, and previously I've been working with Comsol Multiphysics, but k-Wave is both more lightweight and better suited to my simulations.

   I was just wondering if the creators of k-Wave would be interested in having their users contribute to the toolbox? I imagine that I will be making a few additional functions that are helpful for my applications - for example a "makeLine" function similar to the "makeCircle" function that already exists - and I'd be happy to share them with others.

   Kind regards,
   --
   Martin

   Posted 13 years ago #

2. bencox
   

   Developer
   Joined: Mar '10
   Posts: 285

   Hi Martin,

   Glad you're finding it useful. We're very keen for users to contribute to the project, but have no formal mechanism as such yet. For a short function the easiest thing might be to copy and paste it straight onto this forum. For longer functions you could email it to us at mail@k-wave.org, or perhaps host it somewhere and post a link to it here on the forum. If the functions prove useful then we'll give them a polish (if they need it) and use them in future versions of k-Wave (with the author acknowledged, of course).

   If there are other things that you would like to see in k-Wave please let us know. We have a list of improvements that we're working our way through and we're always keen to add to it!

   Thanks,

   Ben

   Posted 13 years ago #

3. jkiv
   

   Member
   Joined: Sep '10
   Posts: 7

   +1 for git (if you haven't already considered something)

   Services like gitorious and github allow anyone to setup a git repository easily. I know with github at least, it is easy to fork a project and publish changes, and perhaps eventually merge back into the original project (though I've never done this.)

   There are also similar services for Mercurial like BitBucket.

   (Not to be spammy but if people are eager to contribute these are good tools to look at.)

   Posted 13 years ago #

4. bencox
   

   Developer
   Joined: Mar '10
   Posts: 285

   Jon,
   Thanks for these tips, we'll look into them. Hopefully we will need something like this soon as more people are keen to contribute.
   Ben

   Posted 13 years ago #

5. jwjs
   

   Member
   Joined: Jun '11
   Posts: 14

   Hi Ben,

   I've noticed that k-Wave is under a GPL license, meaning open-source. As jkiv has mentioned, a public repository for developers to have access would be very beneficial for the community using this software. I would be extremely interested in contributing (especially to a threaded/distributed version running in C/C++ for a lighter memory footprint) to k-Wave, but the current development model makes this... well less than desirable. Getting access to k-Wave via emails as progress moves along is great for end-users, but as someone who is interested in contributing-to/modifying k-Wave there is little incentive. Is there no code repository set-up for k-Wave to use? This would seem quite strange to me for a project of this size. And if there is, is it possible to get access? I would love to see k-Wave opened up to the community for further development. Maybe a possibility?

   Posted 11 years ago #

6. Bradley Treeby
   

   Developer
   Joined: Mar '10
   Posts: 1,640

   Hi jwjs,

   Thanks for your comments, it's definitely valuable to get your opinion. As you have noted, the k-Wave project so far has really been an in-house software development project, rather than a community software project. The new features are often closely tied to our scientific research (for example, nonlinearity was added in B.0.5), so often a manuscript gets submitted at the same time as a new release comes out. The codes are released under an open-source license to allow other users flexibility in what they do with the code. We currently have a number of academic staff, post-docs, and students working on and with the toolbox, so hopefully new releases should be a couple of times a year. We also receive a number of suggestions, code snippets, examples, and bug reports from external users, which is extremely useful.

   With this in mind, I completely agree that this release model makes it more difficult for external people to contribute directly to the code-base. So far, there hasn't been many people wanting to do this, so it hasn't really been a problem. I guess as the scientific functionality of the code stabilises (which it will), then an open repository is likely to be a better approach, particularly for the C++ codes. In the meantime, if there is something in particular you are interested in contributing, then please do let us know.

   We are planning to release our first version of the C++ code for shared memory NUMA architectures in the coming months (described here). Other versions are under active development, and releases will follow as they are completed and tested.

   Kind regards,

   Brad.

   Posted 11 years ago #

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