Chaste: developing sustainable software for computational biology

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Chaste is an open-source framework for the simulation of computational models in biology. Chaste provides modules for handling common scientific computing components, such as meshes and solvers for ordinary/partial differential equations, as well as agent-based and multiscale simulations. Re-use of these components avoids the need for researchers to 'reinvent the wheel' with each new project, accelerating the rate of progress in new applications by providing robust, well-documented and continuously tested libraries. Chaste comprises ~500k lines of C++ code and is freely available under a BSD license.

Since its inception in 2005, Chaste has been downloaded >5,000 times by academic and industrial research groups in >50 countries, and has facilitated a large number of leading scientific studies in areas including cardiac electrophysiology, drug safety assessment, cancer biology, and developmental biology.

Since 2015, Chaste has evolved from being developed primarily within a single institution to being multi-institutional, with multinational contributors. However, at a time when the need for robust software for computational approaches biology is urgent and there is an avalanche of high-quality experimental data requiring modelling to fully interpret, we lack dedicated software development funding to fully realise Chaste's potential uptake by the scientific community as a multiscale, multicellular modelling tool. To this end, we propose to hire research software engineers to complete the following objectives:

1. extend existing functionality for multiscale modelling of multicellular populations;
2. upgrade and future-proof our software development infrastructure;
3. improve the interoperability of our software platform;
4. lower barriers to usage and increase community engagement.

The resulting computational tool and associated infrastructure and training resources will be made freely available and will drive forward computational modelling in biology.