[Users] New Einstein Toolkit Release (Brahe)

[Frank Loeffler]

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

This release includes, among other things, updates to the IllinoisGRMHD code,
updated requirements concerning C++, and updates examples in the gallery. In
addition, bug fixes accumulated since the previous release in November 2015
have been included.

For more detailed information about the "Brahe" release please read the long
release announcement on the Einstein Toolkit web pages:
http://einsteintoolkit.org/about/releases/ET_2016_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. For parts of the toolkit, 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 ===

* Cactus Flesh
  - Enable C++11 by default, and require it to be supported Support bibtex in
    LaTeX thorn documentation External libraries can specify additional paths
    (only) added as include path for Fortran.
  - The 'checkout' target of 'make' has been removed, as it only supported cvs,
    was unused and untested for a long time.
* IllinoisGRMHD/Convert_to_HydroBase: major update
* SetMask_SphericalSurface: modify criterion for setting the mask to avoid
  problems with intermittent apparent horizon finder failures More examples in
  the Einstein Toolkit Gallery (http://einsteintoolkit.org/about/gallery/)
* Simfactory
  - New configurations: acrcluster, centos, cori, minerva, sunnyvale
  - Updates to several machines (too many to list)
  - stampede: fix core affinity settings

* New thorns or tools
  - New thorn WatchDog: a thorn that terminates jobs that do not make progress
    over a user-defined time frame, defined as time in between ANALYSIS steps.

=== How to upgrade from Somerville (ET_2015_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 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, CentOS, and MacOS installations
- Bethe
- Bluewaters
- Comet
- Datura
- Fionn
- Gordon
- GPC
- Gullimin
- MP2
- Nvidia
- Queenbee 2
- Shelob
- Supermike II
- Stampede (CPU)
- Titan
- Zwicky


*  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_2016_05
marking this release.  These release branches will be updated if severe
errors are found.

The "Brahe" Release Team on behalf of the Einstein Toolkit Consortium
(2016-06-15)

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

June 16, 2016

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 819 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
Url : http://lists.einsteintoolkit.org/pipermail/users/attachments/20160616/a9f6e2ad/attachment.bin