Achievement

IGERT Trainee Kevin Sanft led the development of StochKit2: the first major update of the popular StochKit software package for performing stochastic simulations of biochemical models. StochKit2 was developed to give practicing scientists access to efficient implementations of the most popular stochastic simulation methods. The software utilizes parallel processing on multicore architectures for improved performance, and the interface was improved to be more user-friendly. The underlying structure of the code was written to be easily extensible by algorithm developers. StochKit2 also features new output options and visualization tools for plotting statistics, trajectories, and histograms. StochKit2 runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, and is freely available at sourceforge.net under the modified BSD open source license. StochKit2 has been well received by the scientific community. Since releasing the beta version in March 2010, it has been downloaded more than 1500 times.