Get involved & contribute

Everyone is welcome to join CFDEM®project. The CFDEM®coupling and LIGGGHTS® simulation engines are open codes, and we heavily encourage you to get involved. This will improve the codes and their applicability and visibility. It will improve what the code can do for you! In fact, open source projects heavily profit from community feed-back and involvement. In the end, this is a benefit for you - the user. We appreciate your time and efforts!

There are various ways you can contribute to making CFDEM®coupling and LIGGGHTS® better:

  • Point prospective users to this site (www.cfdem.com) and mention it in talks or link to it from your WWW site.
  • Notify us via the discussion boards if you find an error or omission in the documentation or on this site (www.cfdem.com)
  • Don't be shy to ask others for advice and do not hesitate to help others with their problems and questions by using the discussion boards
  • If you think you found a bug in CFDEM®coupling or LIGGGHTS, please report it following the guidelines given below
  • If you publish a paper using LIGGGHTS® results, send the citation (and any cool pictures or movies if you like) to add to the Publications, Pictures, or Movies pages, with links and attributions back to you. Just contact us in this case!
  • LIGGGHTS® is designed to be easy to extend with new code for features like contact laws, boundary conditions, diagnostic computations, etc. If you add a feature of general interest, it can be added to the main CFDEM®coupling and LIGGGHTS® distribution. Please just contact us in this case!
  • If you think you can make a substantial contribution to the project, then join the project team as a project member - please contact us in this case!

The community contributions will strengthen the open source, CFDEM®coupling-PUBLIC and LIGGGHTS®-PUBLIC versions which are freely available to the community!

Guidelines for bug reports - if you are confident that you have found a bug, follow these steps:

  • Be sure you are using the latest software version - if not, update and see if the bug persists.
  • Check the bug section in the discussion boards to see if the bug has already been reported or fixed.
  • The most useful thing you can do to help us fix the bug is to isolate the problem. Run it on the smallest number of particles/computational cells and fewest number of processors and with the simplest problem that reproduces the bug and try to identify what command/feature is causing the problem.
  • If the bug has not been reported or fixed, post to the bug section in the discussion boards describing the problem with any ideas you have as to what is causing it or where in the code the problem might be. The developers will ask for more info if needed.

A bug report must contain

  • Software version, compiler and compiler version and operating system
  • Description of the problem
  • A testcase which can be understood within a minute and can reproduces the problem in less than a minute computation time
  • All files necessary to execute the testcase

Sometimes it can take a little while (some weeks). In any case, the developers will try to pick up the issue as soon as possible.