Find your starting point
The best way to get started with openCARP depends on your background and on what you want to achieve. The sections below are ordered from a first contact with cardiac modeling through to experienced users - find the one that fits you to learn about the suggested route.
Not sure where you stand?
If you are unsure how much you already know - or which skills a particular goal will require - start with our knowledge self-evaluation. You rate your knowledge in the areas that matter for what you want to do and get a personalized overview of which skills you already have, which ones you still need, and where to find the right learning material to close the gaps.
New to cardiac modeling?
If this is one of your first encounters with computational cardiac modeling, it is worth building some background first. The introductory chapter of the user manual gives a concise overview, and our video tutorials on basic cardiac electrophysiology and the introduction to ionic models cover the key concepts.
When you are ready for a first hands-on experience, the onboarding tutorials are the easiest way in. They run in a hosted JupyterLab environment directly in your browser, so there is nothing to install — you work through guided, interactive notebooks for bench, openCARP, and carputils at your own pace. You need some knowledge to run the onboarding tutorials without frustration. Please go to the knowledge self-evaluation, choose Working through onboarding tutorials, rate your skills, and work through the provided learning material.
New to openCARP?
If you are already comfortable with cardiac modeling — or experienced with a different simulation environment — the onboarding tutorials in JupyterLab are the quickest way to get familiar with bench, openCARP, and carputils without installing anything. From there, our examples demonstrate the core features of openCARP and the carputils framework and make good starting points for your own experiments.
To have all necessary knowledge at hand, you may benefit from the knowledge self-evaluation.
To run the examples and your own experiments on your own machine, you will need openCARP installed.
Installation
To get started, we recommend the precompiled installers or the Docker container. If you are comfortable building from source, that route works well too and is the best fit for parallel and HPC systems. All options are described on the installation page. Once installed, the user manual explains how to start a simulation and documents all parameters and commands. Compiling the software from source often gives you the best performance and the most flexibility at the cost of having to spending some more time initially to set things up.
Experienced CARP/CARPentry user?
If you have used CARP or CARPentry before, you should know most of the features and interfaces of openCARP. The differences between CARP/CARPentry and openCARP are explained here. All parameters and commands are detailed in the openCARP manual.
