[Users] Einstein Toolkit Release

[Erik Schnetter]

We are pleased to announce the first release (code name "Bohr") of the
Einstein Toolkit, an open, community developed software infrastructure
for relativistic astrophysics.  The Einstein Toolkit is a collection
of over 130 software components and tools for simulating and analyzing
general relativistic astrophysical systems that builds on numerous
software efforts in the numerical relativity community including
CactusEinstein, the Whisky hydrodynamics code, and the Carpet AMR
infrastructure.  The Cactus Framework is used as the underlying
computational infrastructure providing large-scale parallelization,
general computational components, and a model for collaborative,
portable code development.  The toolkit includes modules to build
complete codes for simulating black hole spacetimes as well as systems
governed by relativistic hydrodynamics.  Current development in the
consortium is targeted at providing additional infrastructure for
general relativistic magnetohydrodynamics.

The Einstein Toolkit uses a distributed software model and its
different modules are developed, distributed, and supported either by
the core team of Einstein Toolkit Maintainers, or by individual
groups.  Where modules are provided by external groups, the Einstein
Toolkit Maintainers provide quality control for modules for inclusion
in the toolkit and help coordinate support.  The Einstein Toolkit
Maintainers currently involve postdocs and faculty from five different
institutions, and hold weekly meetings that are open for anyone to
join in.

Guiding principles for the design and implementation of the toolkit
include:

1: Open, community-driven software development that encourages the
sharing of code across the community, prevents code duplication, and
leads to sustainable support and development of essential code.

2: Well thought out and stable interfaces between components that
enable multiple implementations of physics capabilities, and allow
groups or individuals to concentrate on their areas of interest.

3: Separation of physics software from computational science
infrastructure so that new technologies for large scale computing,
processor accelerators, or parallel I/O can be easily integrated with
science codes.

4: The provision of complete working production codes to provide:
prototypes, standard benchmarks, and testcases; codes that are
available for and usable by the general astrophysics community; tools
for new researchers and groups to enter this field; training and
education for a new generation of researchers.

For more information about using or contributing to the Einstein
Toolkit, or to join the Einstein Toolkit Consortium, please visit our
web pages at <http://einsteintoolkit.org>.

We thank the numerous people who contributed to this software over the
past many years; there are too many to be listed here.  We also
gratefully acknowledge those who helped in the past months to make
this release happen.  The Einstein Toolkit is primarily supported by
NSF 0903973/0903782/0904015 (CIGR), and also by NSF 0701566/0855892
(XiRel), 0721915 (Alpaca), 0725070 (Blue Waters), and 0905046/0941653
(PetaCactus).

The "Bohr" Release Team on behalf of the Einstein Toolkit Consortium
(2010-06-17)



-- 
Erik Schnetter <schnetter at cct.lsu.edu>   http://www.cct.lsu.edu/~eschnett/