[Users] New Einstein Toolkit Release (Hilbert)

[Frank Loeffler]

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

This release includes, among other things, various improvements in the handling
of external libraries (and with that, installations), discontinue the direct
support for Fortran 77 (use Fortran 90 instead), and enable the C++ code in
GRHydro by default. In addition, bug fixes accumulated since the previous
release in November 2014 have been included.

For more detailed information about the "Hilbert" release please read the long
release announcement on the Einstein Toolkit web pages:
http://einsteintoolkit.org/about/releases/ET_2015_05_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
 - New components:
   - CactusExamples/Poisson
   - CactusNumerical/LocalInterp2: a C++ drop-in replacement for LocalInterp
   - CactusNumerical/TestLocalInterp2: containing tests for LocalInterp2
   - CactusUtils/SystemTopology: Utility thorn
 - Moved components:
   - McLachlan moved to Bitbucket

* Simfactory
 - Updates to many machines and some new machines
 - Mac OS: Optionlists have been updated and simplified.  There is now
   osx-macports.cfg and osc-homebrew.cfg which should work on OS X
   10.8, 10.9 and 10.10.  MacPorts updated to use GCC 4.9 to match
   Homebrew. Both optionlists contain comments with the necessary
   "port" and "brew" commands to install the expected packages.  For
   MacPorts, you also need the osx-macports.run runscript.

* External Libraries
 - Delay build of external libraries so they can be 'made' in parallel.
 - Several updates to accommodate changes in system library paths, and update
   some built versions of libraries.

* Cactus:
 - Change default output filename format from implementation::groupname
   to implementation-groupname (parameter IOUtil::out_group_separator).
 - 'make' (without configuration name) works now, as long as there is only
   one configuration present.
 - Piraha replaced parts of the old Cactus parser (but that should not be
   a user visible change).

=== How to upgrade from Wheeler (ET_2014_11) ===

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, Fedora and MacOS installations
- Bluewaters *
- Carver
- Comet
- Datura
- Edison
- Fermi
- Galileo
- Hopper
- Loewe
- Supermike II
- Nvidia
- Orca *
- Philip
- Queenbee 2
- Shelob
- Stampede (CPU)
- 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_2015_05
marking this release.  These release branches will be updated if severe
errors are found.

The "Hilbert" Release Team on behalf of the Einstein Toolkit Consortium (2015-05-18)


Steven R. Brandt
Peter Diener
Roland Haas
Ian Hinder
Frank Löffler
Bruno C. Mundim
Erik Schnetter
Barry Wardell

May 18, 2015


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