[Florent]

Dear colleagues,

PALM is a dynamic parallel coupler developed at CERFACS. Originally designed for data assimilation, PALM is now used for a variety of applications in many fields of multi-physics coupling ranging from oceanography to hydraulics, from hydrology to agronomy, from aeronautics to space engineering and so on. PALM based applications run on every size of computer, from laptop to massively parallel or vector supercomputers. More than 250 scientists and engineers have been trained to PALM usage, and every week new research laboratories, industries or computing service companies join the PALM users' community.

After more than ten years of developments and thanks to the positive and constructive users' feedback, PALM is now ready to become open source under the version 3.0 of the LGPL license.
For this reason it has been renamed O-PALM, as a shorthand for Open-PALM.

The open source distribution policy is the most natural way to further broaden the users' community, to set up new collaborations and to make the coupler constantly evolve.
As a first fruitful example, the French company ONERA has contributed to the O-PALM development by providing an effective library of parallel grid to grid interpolation methods that answers a real need of a large number of users.
In pure open source philosophy, any new contributions are welcome: feel free to contact the PALM team to carry new ideas and developments to the project.

You can find further detailed informations on O-PALM, including contacts, on the dedicated web site
http://www.cerfacs.fr/globc/PALM_WEB

You can download the most recent O-PALM version (currently 4.0.0) from http://www.cerfacs.fr/globc/PALM_WEB...USER/download/.
The release includes the PALM library, the PrePALM graphic user interface and the documentation (including a tutorial).

You do not need to sign any agreement, but you are kindly requested to register as a user. This will contribute to make the O-PALM users' community getting more and more structured and to share resources and hints.

CERFACS regularly provides training sessions with a frequency that will suit the users' needs. The dates, conditions and fares for the training sessions are constantly updated on the PALM web site: http://www.cerfacs.fr/globc/PALM_WEB.../training.html. CERFACS shareholders and CNRS institutions benefit a specific training fare.

We look forward seeing you in the users' list.

Best reagards,

Thierry Morel, Florent Duchaine, Andrea Piacentini and Olivier Thual on behalf of the PALM team.