A new open-source software project is presented, JEMRIS, the Jülich Extensible MRI Simulator, which provides an MRI sequence development and simulation environment for the MRI community. The development was driven by the desire to achieve generality of simulated three-dimensional MRI experiments reflecting modern MRI systems hardware. The accompanying computational burden is overcome by means of parallel computing. Many aspects are covered that have not hitherto been simultaneously investigated in general MRI simulations such as parallel transmit and receive, important off-resonance effects, nonlinear gradients, and arbitrary spatiotemporal parameter variations at different levels. The latter can be used to simulate various types of motion, for instance. The JEMRIS user interface is very simple to use, but nevertheless it presents few limitations. MRI sequences with arbitrary waveforms and complex interdependent modules are modeled in a graphical user interface-based environment requiring no further programming. This manuscript describes the concepts, methods, and performance of the software. Examples of novel simulation results in active fields of MRI research are given. (c) 2010 Wiley-Liss, Inc.