User:WillWare/Physics engines

I am interested in using a physics engine to handle the lumped models in my mixed-mode molecular simulation approach. Ideally it should be able to run on a GPU, but not require a GPU.

The physics engine has to play nice with the molecular dynamics code. An ideal way to deal with this is to take an open-source physics engine and add molecular dynamics energy terms to it. This involves a few subtasks.
 * Borrow from existing molecular dynamics C code.
 * the Src directory of MMTK (see docs)
 * list of other similar programs
 * Write appropriate unit tests to make sure everything is working correctly.
 * Make everything flexible enough to work with different force fields. Examples of different force fields are Gromacs, Charmm-22, Charmm-27, Amber-1999, OPLS-AA, Smith-1994. Also the Brenner potential, which if memory serves, can handle making and breaking chemical bonds, but I think it has many more energy terms than is standard.

Bullet Physics Engine

 * Bullet home page
 * SDK manual

Bullet Physics is a professional open source collision detection, rigid body and soft body dynamics library. The library is free for commercial use under the ZLib license.
 * Software is used on 'as-is' basis. Authors are not liable for any damages arising from its use.
 * The distribution of a modified version of the software is subject to the following restrictions:
 * You must not claim that you wrote the original software,
 * Altered source versions must not be misrepresented as being the original software, and
 * The license notice must not be removed from source distributions.
 * The license does not require source code to be made available.

Physics Abstraction Layer
Physics Abstraction Layer (PAL) (wikipedia entry) provides an abstraction layer for several different physics engines, and can work with or without a GPU. One of the supported engines is PhysX, which runs on NVIDIA GPU hardware. Alas, PhysX is not open source.

Related pages

 * GPUs and CUDA
 * Physics engines
 * Mixed-mode molecular simulation
 * Whole-cell simulation