We are pleased to announce the 4.3.0 release of the Cactus Computational Toolkit, an open source problem solving environment designed for scientists and engineers.
This release includes, among other things, improvements to the Cactus flesh (see below for details), new utility thorns, and changed and additions to the external library thorns. In addition, bug fixes accumulated since the previous release have been included.
Cactus is an open source problem solving environment designed for scientists and engineers. Its modular structure easily enables parallel computation across different architectures and collaborative code development between different groups. Cactus originated in the academic research community, where it was developed and used over many years by a large international collaboration of physicists and computational scientists.
Cactus runs on many architectures. Applications, developed on standard workstations or laptops, can be seamlessly run on clusters or supercomputers. Cactus provides easy access to many cutting edge software technologies being developed in the academic research community.
The Cactus user community has created and is maintaining toolkits for several research fields. The Einstein Toolkit addresses computational relativistic astrophysics, supporting simulations of black holes, neutron stars, and related systems.
For more information about using or contributing to the Cactus Computational Toolkit, please visit our web pages at http://cactuscode.org.
The changes between this and the previous release include:
=== Larger changes since last release ===
* Almost all repositories moved from the Cactus 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. - 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) - added support for an unlimited number of timelevels - Change default output filename format from implementation::groupname to implementation-groupname (parameter IOUtil::out_group_separator). - Piraha replaced parts of the old Cactus parser (but that should not be a user visible change). - Cactus complex number arithmetic functions are deprecated - Prevent Cactus from choking on very large parameter files - support linux-gnueabi architecture (e.g. Raspberry Pi) - check that providing function name is different from aliased function name - Drop explicit support for Fortran 77 in Cactus - Require C99 support - make: Don't require configuration name when only one is present
* External Libraries: - Delay build of external libraries so they can be 'made' in parallel. - HDF5: Enable fortran interface by default, disable C++ interface by default.
* New Components - CactusNumerical/LocalInterp2: a C++ drop-in replacement for LocalInterp - CactusNumerical/TestLocalInterp2: containing tests for LocalInterp2 - CactusNumerical/SummationByParts - CactusUtils/SystemTopology - CactusUtils/MemSpeed - CactusUtils/NaNCatcher - CactusUtils/SystemStatistics - ExternalLibraries/PAPI - ExternalLibraries/libncurses - ExternalLibraries/libreadline - ExternalLibraries/pthreads
=== How to upgrade from 4.2.0 ===
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://cactuscode.org/download/ Download] page on the Cactus 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.
=== Machine notes ===
Supported (tested through the Einstein Toolkit) 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
* 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 Cactus_4.3.0 marking this release. These release branches will be updated if severe errors are found.
The 4.3.0 Release Team (2015-11-11)
Steven R. Brandt Peter Diener Roland Haas Ian Hinder Frank Löffler Bruno C. Mundim Erik Schnetter Barry Wardell
November 11, 2015