ASCEND modelling environment News

Please see https://github.com/ascend4/ascend4 for the latest code and development. Our website https://ascend4.org/ remains active but in need of updates.

With thanks to Antonio Trande for sorting out various packaging problems, a working version of ASCEND is now available in the Fedora 20 (and hopefully subsequent) software repositories! So why not sudo yum install ascend!!

If you have any experiences to report in relation to running ASCEND on this platform, we would be very keen to here about them, perhaps through our ascend-sim-users mailing list here on SF.net.... read more

ASCEND has been accepted again to participate in Google Summer of Code. This scheme allows current students to work on open source programming projects over the (northern hemisphere) summer break, and get paid for their work.

See http://ascend4.org/GSOC2012 for details.

We have been working on implementing support for native 64-bit Windows with ASCEND, and hope to make a new release including support for this platform very soon.

If you are interested in helping to test the new build for this platform, please take a look here:
http://ascend4.org/Building_ASCEND_for_64-bit_Windows

ASCEND has added a Twitter feed for the project. Currently, this feed contains a report of each code commit to our Subversion repository. See our feed at http://twitter.com/ascend4

Arash Sadrieh presented a paper about his work on development of a GPU-based solver for ASCEND at the recent 21st European Symposium on Computer-Aided Process Engineering (ESCAPE-21) in Greece. He reported that the ASCEND project is still alive and kicking, and received strong interest in his GPU-based solver project. For more information, see http://ascend4.org/Arash_Sadrieh.

The ASCEND project will again be participating in the Google Summer of Code programme, now for the third year in a row. We hope to take about 5 student projects, building on the progress made in early years. Please check our wiki for the Student Projects list, as well our advice to applicants, see

http://ascend4.org/GSOC2011

As it says there: try to get involved early -- our experience is that the best GSOC participants are also the students who come along before the deadline, communicate with us in a meaningful way, and contribute new code, patches, suggestions, etc before the application itself. Ways you can do that are listed above.

Due to a server error, we recently (May 2010) lost our ASCEND wiki and have had to rebuild it from cached HTML, but about 10% of content is missing and irretrievable. We will be working gradually to replace the lost content.

The ASCEND project will be participating again in Google Summer of Code this year, 2010. Interested students should look at the following page:

http://ascendwiki.cheme.cmu.edu/GSOC2010

On 24 Dec 2009, a new version of ASCEND, version 0.9.7 was released. This version includes the contributions from our recent participation in the Google Summer of Code programme, as well as numerous bug-fixes.

This is also the first release that works on Mac OS X. The code can be compiled and run on that platform; we hope to release a binary installer for Mac with the next release.

Any feedback on the new version is most appreciated -- please check out our mailing list here on SF.net.... read more

The GSOC programme for 2009 is now finished, and we have several exciting new features added to ASCEND. Of general interest will be

* improved DAE syntax, that to Dante,
* full support for the IPOPT optimisation solver, together with exact calculation of second derivatives, thanks to Mahesh,
* support for reading data from CSV and other tabular data formats, with cubic spline interpolation, thanks to José... read more

Version 0.9.6 of the ASCEND modelling environment has been
released. This version is mostly a bugfix release, with a
few improvements to packaging. We have released binaries of
ASCEND for Ubuntu 9.04, Fedora 9, and Windows with this
release.

To download, click here:
https://sourceforge.net/project/platformdownload.php?group_id=167528

Release notes & changelog are here:
https://sourceforge.net/project/shownotes.php?release_id=679586&group_id=167528

Student proposals for work with ASCEND as part of this year's Google Summer of
Code have been announced on the GSOC website:

http://socghop.appspot.com/org/home/google/gsoc2009/ascend

We would like to congratulate the five successful applicants, and to thank
everyone who submitted a proposal.

It was great to see so much interest in ASCEND from far and wide, and to see
so many (over 60) high-quality applicants. There were many fine proposals for
interesting projects which we would have very much liked to pursue but which
could not be accepted due to the limits on the number of 'slots' available to
us.... read more

ASCEND will be participating in the GSOC programme for 2009, meaning that we are now in a position to start talking to students who would like to make a contribution to our project. Applications open 23 Mar and close 3 Apr.

ASCEND is a general-purpose equation-solving and simulation environment for engineers and scientists, based on research from Carnegie Mellon University.

An overview of ASCEND:
http://ascendwiki.cheme.cmu.edu/ASCEND_overview... read more

After upgrading our server to Ubuntu 8.04, our wiki and subversion repository are back online again. We have yet to reinstall our Buildbot, but all other project services should now be running well again (as of Monday 21 Jul 2008).

There is now a DEB package available for the latest ASCEND release 0.9.5.114_13. The file is accessible from our SF.net Downloads page.

A new ASCEND release was made yesterday. This is mostly and incremental enhancement release, with a few bugs fixed and a few new minor features.

At this stage, Windows installer and source code tarball have been uploaded. Debian and Fedora packages should follow shortly.

You can read more in the Changelog at
http://ascendsvn.cheme.cmu.edu/ascend/code/branches/extfn/CHANGELOG.txt

Cheers
JP

- Fixed launching problems on Windows
- Added Units of Measurement dialog to PyGTK GUI.
- Updated version check to use the CMU server instead of old UNSW server.
- Fixed ascend-config script for Windows paths containing spaces.
- Fixed display of logrels in PyGTK GUI.
- PyGTK GUI correctly opens PDF docs if available on local machine.
- Added a PyGTK crash dialog to give information about failures in ASCEND.
- DOPRI5 converted to full 'solver' status (lives in solvers/dopri5 now).
- Added (experimental) DOPRI5 integrator to the Windows binary installer.
- Fixed some problems with linking to CONOPT optimiser
- Streamlined some internal build-time dependencies.
- Improved gtksourceview-2.0 highlighting for use with Gedit on Linux.
- Added Graphviz bindings to allow dependency graph view.
- Some code renaming/refactoring in 'compiler' and 'system' sections.
- Fixed splash-screen behaviour
- Refactored 'moduleview' out of 'gtkbrowser'.
- Some preliminary fixes to attempt support for Mac platform.
- Added some CUnit test cases for 'compiler' section, renamed all CUnit tests.
- Fixed dlopen bug on Linux.
- Changes to measures.a4l to add SI prefixes and modified the base units to
their abbreviation instead of full names.... read more

The ASCEND server was offline for ~24h but is back online now.

A new version of the ASCEND modelling environment has been released. This is a minor bug fix release. The Help menu links in the PyGTK GUI have been fixed, and the Windows installer now includes header files for use by developers. ASCEND 'external libraries' have been given a new naming convention as well. This version of ASCEND also works with freesteam 0.7.2 for calculation of IAPWS steam properties.... read more

Windows users: the original ascend-0.9.5.112-py2.5.exe file that was uploaded as part of the current release was incompletely uploaded, resulting in a 'file corrupt' warning when you attempted to install it.

I have replaced this file; the new file should be propagated to SF.net mirrors within 24 hours (some time on Thu 9 Aug 2007)

This new ASCEND version provides a much improved Windows installer, and provides a new solver API which works using separate DLLs for each new solver/integrator that you want to use. We have also improved the packaging of ASCEND for Linux, and have got an experimental version of the DOPRI5 integrator.

Download the new version of ASCEND from
http://sourceforge.net/project/platformdownload.php?group_id=167528

A new release, version 0.9.5.111 has been made.
This release provides several improvements to the
Windows installer, including file associations for
.a4c files and better detection of missing
prerequisites.

The download is available at:
http://sourceforge.net/project/platformdownload.php?group_id=167528

At this point the binaries in this release are
for Windows only; a source code tarball will also
be available shortly.... read more

We are currently experiencing hardware problems with our webserver. The website and subversion repository are likely to be offline for a week, until around 8 May. Apologies for the inconvenience.

A Windows installer for ASCEND is now available on our SF.net download page. Download the file here:
http://sourceforge.net/project/platformdownload.php?group_id=167528&sel_platform=1675

or read more about it on our wiki:
http://ascendwiki.cheme.cmu.edu/

We have recently released some Ubuntu and Fedora packages (.deb and .rpm) of our current alpha-quality release of ASCEND including Python bindings, a new Integrator API for dynamic problems, and updated support for conditional modelling. A Win32 installer will follow shortly.

Download the new packages from
http://sourceforge.net/project/platformdownload.php?group_id=167528