[Users] New Einstein Toolkit Release (Somerville)

Frank Loeffler knarf at cct.lsu.edu
Thu Nov 12 09:59:28 CST 2015 

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

This release includes, among other things, improvements to the Cactus flesh,
re-writes of the space-time solver McLachlan, a new GRMHD evolver
(IllinoisGRMHD), and a multi-grid elliptic solver working in Carpet (CTThorns).
In addition, bug fixes accumulated since the previous release in May 2015 have
been included.

For more detailed information about the "Somerville" release please read
the long release announcement on the Einstein Toolkit web pages:
http://einsteintoolkit.org/about/releases/ET_2015_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 ===

* Almost all repositories moved from the Einstein Toolkit subversion server
  to bitbucket, with the ExternalLibraries being the only exception. Taking
  this move as opportunity, some already existing thorns were moved to more
  appropriate arrangements.

* Cactus Flesh
  - While not a particular user-visible change, the Cactus version number was
    bumped to 4.3.0, as a new version of Cactus was released at the same time
    as this Einstein Toolkit release.
  - Thorns can specify versions for capabilities they provide, and thorns
    using them can depend on specific versions of those.
  - pthread support got moved into a thorn (ExternalLibraries/pthreads)
* McLachlan
  - re-write of the BSSN thorns: some parameter names changed. Backwards
    compatible parameter names exist, but the old are deprecated now. Please
    switch to the new, more consistent, parameter names.


* New thorns or tools
  - IllinoisGRMHD (and connected thorns): a new GRMHD code within the Einstein
    Toolkit. This isn't a drop-in replacement for GRHydro (as a lot of the
    functionality, and parameters are different), but should be seen as
    alternative. They are placed in the WVUThorns arrangement.
  - CTThorns: Elliptic solver for Cactus/Carpet. This is a multi-grid solver,
    and so far has mostly been used for cosmology-type simulations.
  - AH2xdmf.py script (new utility within the AHFinderDirect thorn):
    reads ASCII AHFinderDirect output files and combines data into hdf5 file
    that can easily be visualized as time-series within tools like VisIt
  - PITTNullCode/SphericalHarmonicReconGen: generic version of SphericalHarmonicRecon

=== How to upgrade from Hilbert (ET_2015_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 repository moves.

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, Ubuntu, Fedora and MacOS installations
- Bethe
- Bluewaters *
- Carver
- Comet
- Datura
- Edison
- Fermi
- Galileo
- Gordon
- Gullimin
- Hopper
- Nvidia
- Philip
- Queenbee 2
- Shelob
- Supermike II
- 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_11
marking this release.  These release branches will be updated if severe
errors are found.

The "Somerville" Release Team on behalf of the Einstein Toolkit Consortium
(2015-11-11)


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

November 12, 2015


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