Comment (by Gabriele Bozzola):

I recently gave a tutorial on the Einstein Toolkit, and made this (confusing) image to explain how I personally see our ecosystem.

* The Einstein Toolkit is in the red circle. It includes several different modules. * The most important module is Cactus, a high-performance computational infrastructure. * Einstein Toolkit includes several components that are built on top of Cactus, these are called thorns (green circle). Several thorns that are not part of the Einstein Toolkit exist, some open-source, many private. It is perfectly acceptable for a research group to develop their own thorns for internal use. * Some of the thorns interact with tools that are not part of the Einstein Toolkit (e.g., LORENE, but also GSL). I call them bridges because they interface codes that are developed completely outside of ET and bring functionalities in. * The Einstein Toolkit also contains codes that do not depend on Cactus at all. I call them stand-alone codes, such as Self-force-1D. * The Einstein Toolkit comes with several *utilities*, some that interact with Cactus based codes (e.g., kuibit), some that do not. There exist several utilities that work closely with the Einstein Toolkit but are not part of the ET. * Finally, the Einstein Toolkit would not exist without a decent amount of *infrastructure*. In my personal view, this infrastructure is part of the project and its value.

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Ticket URL: https://bitbucket.org/einsteintoolkit/tickets/issues/2674/einstein-toolkit-cactus