[Users] New Einstein Toolkit Release (Herschel)

[Frank Loeffler]

We are pleased to announce the tenth release (code name "Herschel"
(Caroline)) of the Einstein Toolkit, an open, community developed
software infrastructure for relativistic astrophysics.

This release includes various improvements in the handling of external
libraries (and with that, installations), and extensions of basis thorns
(most notably HydroBase). In addition, bug fixes accumulated since the
previous release in May 2014 have been included, and most of the source
code repositories moved from svn (hosted by the ET directly) to git
(hosted by BitBucket).

For more detailed information about the "Herschel" release please read
the long release announcement on the Einstein Toolkit web pages:
http://einsteintoolkit.org/about/releases/ET_2014_11_announcement.php.

The Einstein Toolkit is a collection of 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 Carpet AMR infrastructure and
the relativistic magneto-hydrodynamics code GRHydro. 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
magneto-hydrodynamics.

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 six different institutions,
and host weekly meetings that are open for anyone to join in.

Guiding principles for the design and implementation of the toolkit
include: open, community-driven software development; well thought out
and stable interfaces; separation of physics software from computational
science infrastructure; provision of complete working production code;
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.

The Einstein Toolkit is primarily supported by NSF
1212401/1212426/1212433/1212460 (Einstein Toolkit), and also by
0905046/0941653 (PetaCactus) and 0710874 (LONI Grid).

The Einstein Toolkit contains about 200 regression test cases. On a
large portion of the tested machines, almost all of these test suites
pass, using both MPI and OpenMP parallelization.

The changes between this and the previous release include:

=== Larger changes since last release ===

* Repositories
 - Many repositories converted from Subversion to Git, including some
   reorganization of thorns within arrangements.
 - Deprecated components (still present)
   - ADMCoupling
   - ADMMacros
 - New components:
   - CUDA and OpenCL examples
   - PAPI
   - OpenBLAS
   - MemSpeed<li>
   - NaNCatcher
 - Moved components:
    - Almost all thorns except ExternalLibraries moved to Bitbucket
    - GRHydro and GRHydro_InitData into EinsteinEvolve
    - All Carpet thorns moved to Carpet arrangement (now on BitBucket)

* Simfactory
 - Source repository moved to BitBucket
 - Updates to many machines

* HDF5
 - Enable fortran interface by default, disable C++ interface by
   default.

* MPI
 - Rewrite MPI thorn configuration script to attempt to determine paths
   automatically using mpicxx.<br> Automatic detection should succeed on
   most machines (no MPI variable set in option list); if not, setting
   MPI_DIR to the installation directory of the desired MPI installation
   should in most cases suffice.

* Cactus:
 - Plan to change output filename format from implementation::groupname
   to implementation__groupname. Introduced new parameter
   IOUtil::out_group_separator which currently defaults to '::' to maintain
   compatibility. The next release will change this to '__' for
   compatibility with Windows filesystems.

* Kranc:
 - Kranc: Compatibility fixes for Mathematica 10

=== How to upgrade from Wheeler (ET_2014_05) ===

To upgrade from the previous release, use GetComponents with the new
thornlist to check out the new version. Switching to the new branch is
not possible for most repositories due to the repository move.

See the [http://einsteintoolkit.org/download Download] page on the
Einstein Toolkit website for download instructions.

=== Remaining issues with this release ===

* Certain machines need to be configured specially in Simfactory because
  the remote directories cannot be determined automatically just from the
  user name. See the Machine notes below.

* Recovering with Carpet: Carpet stores metadata (such as the simulation
  time) only for Carpet::max_timelevels time levels, although it is
  possible to allocate more time levels. These additional time levels then
  cannot be recovered; the symptom is an assertion failure during
  recovery. The solution is to either increase Carpet::max_timelevels, or
  to decrease the number of active time levels.

=== Machine notes ===

Supported (tested) machines include:

- Default Debian, Suse, Fedora and MacOS installations
- Bethe
- Bluewaters *
- Carver
- Datura
- Gordon
- Hopper
- Hydra
- Loewe
- Supermike II *
- Nvidia *
- Orca *
- Philip
- Shelob
- Stampede (CPU) *
- Trestles
- Zwicky

A "*" means that a small number of tests fail on that machine. Almost all
tests pass on the other machines.

* Stampede: defs.local.ini needs to have sourcebasedir = $WORK and
  basedir = $SCRATCH/simulations configured for this machine. You need to
  determine $WORK and $SCRATCH by logging in to the machine.

All repositories participating in this release carry a branch ET_2014_11
marking this release. These release branches will be updated if severe
errors are found.

The "Herschel" Release Team on behalf of the Einstein Toolkit Consortium
(2014-11-19)


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