How to install PEST

PEST is an advanced software tool for model calibration, parameter estimation and predictive uncertainty analysis. It is open-source and freely available, and currently distributed by S. S. Papadopoulos & Associates, Inc. The Simile interface has been verified to work with PEST version 9 and later, on Windows, Linux and MacOS.

Windows users can download a pre-compiled version of PEST from this site and follow the instructions to enable it to run from the command line. Typing 'pest' to the command prompt will produce a message about usage if it is correctly installed.

Linux and Mac users will need to compile PEST from source. PEST is written in FORTRAN, and the GNU g95 compiler is suitable for compiling it. This is part of the GNU compiler collection, and is freely available from SourceForge. Some Linux distributions have the gfortran extension to gcc available from their software repositories, which is also suitable for compiling PEST.

It should be possible to build the package using the makefile shipped with it. The simplest way to get this to work is to create a symlink called 'f90' to the g95 compiler, since the makefiles all include f90 as the default compiler name. This can be placed in a directory in the executable search path, e.g., ~/bin. A symlink to the PEST executable can also be made in this directory once it is compiled.

Check that PEST is installed correctly by typing 'pest' to the command prompt before attempting to run it from within Simile. If it is set up correctly, it will generate a usage help message.

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