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This is a collection of programs and modules, written in C, intended to support research and education concerning Low Density Parity Check (LDPC) codes. These error-correcting codes were invented by Robert Gallager in the early 1960's, and re-invented and shown to have very good performance by David MacKay and myself (Radford Neal) in the mid-1990's. The decoding algorithm for LDPC codes is related to that used for Turbo codes, and to probabilistic inference methods used in other fields. Variations on LDPC and Turbo codes are currently the best practical codes known, in terms of their ability to transmit data at rates approaching channel capacity with very low error probability.

Current and past versions of the software are available here, from Radford Neal's web page. The source code for this software is also hosted here at Github, where there is also a copy of the documentation pages for the latest release.

I do not have current plans to add new features to this package. But you're welcome to! Feel free to fork the repository, and create your own extension (see the part of the documentation regarding Github facilities). I'm willing to consider incorporating other people's extensions into this repository, as long as they are of good quality (including good documentation in the same HTML format as the current documentation), don't depart much from the original purpose of this package, and are of a nature that allows me to verify that they are suitable without too much effort. I'm also willing to make routine bug fixes, so feel free to report bugs using the Github "Issues" tracker (you'll need a Github account, which is free).

The stable version of 2012-02-11 is now available. In the repository, it is the branch "LDPC-2012-02-11". The "master" branch is the development version. The "gh-pages" branch has the documentation for LDPC-2012-02-11, and will continue to have the documentation for that version until the next stable version is released.