MBDyn - MultiBody Dynamics Download Page

Get the latest release of MBDyn - free MultiBody/multidisciplinary Dynamics analysis Software - or follow the links to the official sites of the related software.
But first make sure you carefully read the license terms and conditions and the disclaimer reported below.

Source code

See this link for up-to-date snapshots for Windows XP (compiled under MSYS/MinGW & Cygwin).

If you enjoy MBDyn, please consider posting a message on the mbdyn-users@mbdyn.org mailing list to let us know what you are using MBDyn for. Interesting projects can be listed in MBDyn's Research Page.

Related packages

MBDyn may use a number of packages that must be downloaded, configured, built and installed separately if not present on the target system. In most cases, those packages are optional, and come with enough documentation.

It is no longer necessary to install special solvers; especially those with annoying non-free licenses are strongly discouraged, if support still works at all. In most cases, the built-in naive solver is all one needs, since it's faster than any other up to roughly 5000 equations. In any case, installing UMFPACK is recommended to have another good sparse solver available. Right now, UMFPACK is very easy to build and install, so no specific instructions are provided here. If correctly configured and installed, MBDyn's configure will find it. As of this writing, UMFPACK 5.1 either with ATLAS or with Goto BLAS implementation is known to work fine with MBDyn.

If there's a good free/libre or open source sparse solver you know of and you'd like to see it supported in MBDyn, please let us know.

Optional: the LAPACK/CLAPACK libraries.

Optional: direct eigenanalysis can be performed using the ARPACK libraries.

Optional: the parallel implementation requires:

Optional: the symbolic manipulation requires:

Optional: Libltdl, a library that allows to run-time load modules (usually distributed with libtool). MBDyn can be easily customized by writing run-time loadable modules for many purposes.

Supported platforms

MBDyn has been successfully compiled on a number of Unix and Unix-like platforms. It is currently developed under GNU/Linux, so it might require some care to compile on other platforms. The package comes with a configure that allows to trigger most of the optional features.

It is known to work on:

Binaries for Windows XP built on a somewhat regular basis are available at this site. Currently there are no plans to port the software natively on Microsoft Windows NT/2000/XP; if anyone succeeds in such porting, please drop us a note (and possibly a patch :).

Build Instructions

The basic steps are:

Licensing issues

The MBDyn package is distributed under Version 2 of the Free Software Foundation's GPL license (text version), which basically states* you can do whatever you want with it (e.g. alter the code and distribute binaries even for a fee) provided you also distribute the sources, you don't alter the copyright and the license terms and conditions, and in case of changes you clearly mark the modified source files as changed.

This is required to make the code as free and open as possible, and to deny the possibility to restrict its freedom by other parties. However MBDyn may link third-party code that is licensed under stricter terms, whose license doesn't allow the distribution of binaries and sources but allows to get them without any fee from the official repository. Moreover MBDyn may use third party commercial software that requires a specific license, which must be purchased separately and independently from MBDyn.

The main copyright holders at present are Paolo Mantegazza and Pierangelo Masarati. Contributors must explicitly share the copyright of the code they contribute to MBDyn with the main copyright holders, because the main copyright holders want to be able to act against any license violations. The main copyright holders reserve for themselves the right to change the license of subsequent versions of the code as permitted by the GPL, because they want to be able to protect the distribution of the code in case flaws in the license are discovered. This will not alter any user's rights on an already distributed version.

Any static/dynamic object that comes with MBDyn must be considered part of the code and NOT a library. As a consequence, it is covered by the same license as the code.

Disclaimer

The package MBDyn is provided AS IS AND WITHOUT ANY EXPLICIT OR IMPLICIT WARRANTY. The developers' team and the Dipartimento di Ingegneria Aerospaziale of the University "Politecnico di Milano" shall not be considered responsible for any damage, including partial or total loss of data, resulting from the use of MBDyn or from any implementation bug of MBDyn or any part of it. As any software, MBDyn cannot be guaranteed to be totally bug-free. The user is also warned that there may be an appreciable difference between reality and the analytical models used in the implementation of the code, which are an idealization of reality. Moreover, there may exist large uncertainties in the input data, whose collection and preparation is under the responsibility of the user. As a consequence, the results of Computational Mechanics analyses should always be considered with care and interpreted by users with specific skills before relying on them when safety is concerned. Downloading the package implies the acceptance of these conditions as well as of those stated in the above mentioned license.

* Better read the license anyway :)


Maintained by mbdyn@aero.polimi.it