BEAMnrc

Before dowloading and installing BEAMnrc, please read the system requirements further down on this page and the license information. Downloading files from this site implies acceptance of the BEAM General Licence agreement. Note that, unlike earlier BEAM and BEAMnrc versions that included a copy of the EGSnrc system, you must now first install EGSnrc before installing BEAMnrc.

Latest release, V4 2.3.2

The latest release of the BEAMnrc user code is BEAMnrc V4 2.3.2, released on 18 May 2011. We recommend that you have EGSnrc V4 2.3.2 installed on your system before you attempt a BEAM installation. Once EGSnrc is installed, you can select one of the two BEAMnrc installation methods provided below. For more detailed BEAMnrc installation instructions you can read the BEAMnrc user's manual.

Method 1

This is the easiest way to install BEAMnrc, but it only works on Windows and Linux systems. Download the single self-extracting archive and run the installation wizard. Note that Linux users may need to make the installation wizard executable with the chmod u+x command.

Method 2

This method is only for Linux, Unix or Mac OSX systems that can not run the installation wizard. First download the installation script and the various archives (in .tar.gz format), saving all files in the same directory. Make the script executable and run it by issuing the commands below. Note that you should not redirect the output of the script as in earlier versions because the script is now interactive.

chmod u+x install_beam
./install_beam

Older releases

BEAMnrc V4 2.3.1, released on 19 February 2010:

System requirements

Our development and production environment is a cluster of Linux PCs and so the BEAMnrc package should be most stable and feature complete on Linux. Since the 2005 release BEAMnrc also works on Windows and possibly Mac OSX.

A Fortran compiler.

The system requires a FORTRAN F77 compiler and some pieces require a C compiler. The GNU compilers are fine.

A make utility.

A make utility is required for compiling. GNU make is better than traditional Unix make versions. We provide a pre-compiled GNU make with the Windows installer.

EGS_Windows for vizualization.

The EGS_Windows graphics facility is now available for X-windows based system with OpenGL or Mesa3D. In particular it works on a Linux system.

Enough memory.

We developed most of the system with 32 MB of memory but by having 80 MB we get much faster compilations and for typical in-phantom calculations 128 MB is a recommended minimum. Our current multi-core CPU systems have over 4 GB, and on any modern desktop computer memory should therefore not be an issue (unless scoring large phantom data sets).

Enough disk space.

Disk space used to be the big issue. Students here seem to need at least 4 GB (each) to survive, but 2 GB can allow some very substantial calculations to get done. Again, on modern systems disk space is not much of a concern anymore.

A fast processor.

As with any Monte Carlo simulation, the more raw CPU power the better, so CPU performance will always remain a concern. We currently work off a number of 8 core CPU 3 GHz Intel systems, and use a large cluster of 400 processors for intensive production runs. Believe it or not, much of our early work was done using single CPU 200 MHz machines, or even slower!

Grace (formally xmgr).

Several of the analysis tools use the graphics package Grace which is widely available for free. There is no Grace version for Windows available. This implies that Windows users will have to modify the output routines of the various analysis programs to produce whatever format they prefer (or install Cygwin/X to access a linux environment under Windows).

Tcl/Tk.

All of the GUIs use Tcl/Tk and wish, a freeware package (normally included with most Linux distributions). The GUIs were developed using Tcl version 7.5, Tk version 4.1 and wish 4.1 or wishx. Version 8 of Tcl/Tk for many platforms can be downloaded from http://www.activestate.com/activetcl/downloads .

Note that the makers of Tcl/Tk have made no promises of backwards compatibility. We therefore cannot guarantee that these GUIs will work for all versions of Tcl/Tk, although version 8 appears to work with the current version of the GUIs.