ELM Modeling Tools

We strive to continue to make the ELM available/functional to the community.

Required* tools - hardware & OS
to run the ELM, you need a hardware platform supporting either unix or linux, such as:
EITHER Sun UltraSPARC workstation (or equivalent) - current serial implementation for all applications, running Solaris 8; (runtime = 25 min/yr for optimized ELM code, 10,394 1 km^2 grid cells, on a 200 MHz Ultra I/II class cpu, using ~68 MB RAM)
OR a high-end PC with any flavor of linux (the ELM is moving away from Sun workstations & Solaris to multi-processor Dell PCs running linux)

Required* tools - compiler & editor
to build the ELM executable, you need a compiler such as:

EITHER gcc - GNU Compiler Collection (Open Source, Free Software Foundation)
OR Sun Forte Developer 6 - currently used, integrated development environment: compiler, debugger, profiler, other
AND any good text editor, such as XEmacs (Open Source), VIM (Open Source), or even vi, (but it is highly desirable to have an editor that can view the input/output data files that span a large number of columns, and can be plugged into an Integrated Development Environment)

Required* tools - spatial data processor
to view and manipulate input and output spatial data, you need:

EITHER GRASS - currently used, (Open Source) GIS for raster, vector, and point data manipulation, analysis, input/output for model
OR ArcGIS - GIS by ESRI for raster, vector, and point data manipulation, analysis, input/output for model
OR any other program that can process & visualize raster, vector, and point data

Required* tools - spreadsheet/stats
to view and manipulate input and output text row/column data, you need:

EITHER OpenOffice - (Open Source) Office suite (~StarOffice sold by Sun, both with functionality of Microsoft Office) - spreadsheet (and word processor, etc) used in basic graphing and analysis of model text output files
OR MS Office - Office suite - spreadsheet (and word processor, etc) used in basic graphing and analysis of model text output files
OR a statistics package such as SAS, SAS JMP - to graph and analyze model text output files

Other desirable tools in current use

Python - (Open Source) object-oriented scripting language used extensively in model output postprocessing
S-Plus for statistical and geostatistical analysis
Interactive Data Language for analysis of spatial data, used extensively in model output postprocessing
Filemaker Pro desktop database software for many of the data used by ELM
MapII: Macintosh map processor for simple raster file presentation; no longer available, but still fast and nice to use

Other tools not currently used/supported

MPI Message Passing Interface (Open Source), for implementing a parallelized ELM on a heterogenous network of workstations or on parallel supercomputers; we have fully functional parallel ELM code, but are not fully maintaining it to to staff resources; we have an existing startup account on a 32 node IBM SP2 at the Maui High Performance Computing Center, and full access to a 6-processor Sun Enterprise (UltraSparc class) server at SFWMD.
r.le - a GRASS (Open Source) module for spatial data analysis using landscape ecological metrics
Stella - icon-based simulation modeling software, runs in interpreted mode; was used in early initial development of unit model
Madonna - compiles unit model equation sets for extremely fast runtime; recently used in unit model analysis and parameter optimization.
Oracle database system that the ELM is moving towards for some data processing
* Required tools for developing a fully functional ELM project for reviewers; some post-processing tools for multiple model applications will require commercial software such as IDL.