Code Status Before Start of Project

The MicroMag code had been in existence for a number of years and in common with many other scientific codes had been developed by several different people, without a clear development plan resulting in a code that, whilst was rich with scientific functionality, was also difficult to maintain with some legacy features.

Prior to the main software project, core CSE effort had been employed to replace the deprecated DVODEpk ODE solver with a modern library, CVODE. This itself resulted in a modest speed up of the code in serial. However, the CVODE library can also be called in parallel, and this gave an initial starting point for the current dCSE project by looking at how MicroMag could be run in parallel. Prior to the start of the main dCSE project NAG CSE re-factored the original, serial code. This resulted in a code that was much simpler, without obsolete functionality or historical features, but also without the use of the CVODE library.