[Users] meeting minutes for 2020-02-06

[Ian Hinder]

On 6 Feb 2020, at 16:03, Erik Schnetter <schnetter at cct.lsu.edu<mailto:schnetter at cct.lsu.edu>> wrote:

On Thu, Feb 6, 2020 at 10:47 AM Roland Haas <rhaas at illinois.edu<mailto:rhaas at illinois.edu>> wrote:

* Are we ready to turn off CactusCode.org<http://CactusCode.org>?
** all in favor for moving

I notice that this topic has been mentioned in the notes on the
Einstein Toolkit mailing list, but has not been announced (in an email
of its own), nor has it been mentioned on the Cactus mailing lists at
all.
I understand that most of the active development these days is
happening on the context of the Einstein Toolkit, and that maintaining
the cactuscode.org<http://cactuscode.org> domain web server seems like a burden, but Cactus
is usable by itself, and publicly stating that Cactus is subsumed by
the Einstein Toolkit greatly reduces the impact of the Toolkit on the
computational science side. This probably won't affect physics
funding, but this will make it more difficult to obtain funding from
non-astrophysics sources. For example, CISE might ask why they should
fund an astrophysics-only project where the maintainers decided
deliberately to restrict the target audience of their software.

I agree.  For some of the non-NR projects I am now working on, I feel like I'm constantly missing and reinventing things that Cactus provides.  Some of these projects might benefit from being Cactus thorns.  Already, selling Cactus to people might be a little difficult, due to the learning curve and the extra "baggage" that you need to learn.  This wouldn't be helped by Cactus being perceived as "a relativity code".

--
Ian Hinder
Research Software Engineer
University of Manchester, UK

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.einsteintoolkit.org/pipermail/users/attachments/20200207/ae8625da/attachment.html