We are pleased to announce release 4.0.0 of the Cactus computational toolkit, an open source problem solving environment designed for scientists and engineers. This release includes new features like support for CUDA compilers, support for new architectures and comes bundled with supporting tools like GetComponents and Simfactory. Also, CactusExternal is now deprecated in favor of the better infrastructure in ExternalLibraries. In addition, bug fixes accumulated since the previous release in February 2009 have been included. Cactus provides computational scientists and engineers with a collaborative, modular and portable programming environment for parallel high performance computing. Cactus can make use of many other technologies for HPC, such as HDF5, PETSc and PAPI, and several application domains such as numerical relativity, computational fluid dynamics and quantum gravity are developing open community toolkits for Cactus. Cactus allows you to develop code in your language of choice: F77, F90, C, C++ are all supported — developers write their own components, which we call "thorns" which are connected together by the Cactus "flesh". Developers and users can take advantage of a selection of existing computational thorns, as well as a growing number of domain specific thorns. Cactus runs on a wide range (just about all) architectures and operating systems. Cactus is being used as the basis for numerous projects in computational science, and new technologies such as Grid computing, parallel file I/O, adaptive mesh refinement are very quickly available to our users. Cactus is developed and supported by an international team of computational and computer scientists, based largely at the Center for Computation & Technology at Louisiana State University. For more information about using or contributing to the Cactus Framework, please visit our web pages at . The Cactus Framework is partially supported by NSF 0903973/0903782/0904015 (CIGR), and also by NSF 0701566/0855892 (XiRel), 0721915 (Alpaca), 0905046/0941653 (PetaCactus) and 0710874 (LONI Grid). The "4.0.0" Release Team on behalf of the Cactus Framework Group (2011-10-25) Significant Changes ------------------- - SILENT=no is deprecated, use VERBOSE=yes - Compilation is now much quieter by default - CactusExternal is deprecated, use ExternalLibraries - Cactus now handles parameter files with DOS line breaks - LocalInterp and LocalReduce are now in CactusNumerical - Cactus now accepts multi-line strings in parameter files. - Parameters in STORAGE specifications are now allowed. - Prototypes for scheduled functions are now generated, which might lead to compiler errors for incorrectly declared functions. - Cactus now checks for, and provides MAKE, TAR, GZIP_CMD, PATCH and GIT - Optional usage of capabilities is now possible. - New configuration flags were added, e.g. for debugging, profiling, openmp and warning options (r4656). - Documentation can now be built in pdf and html. - Fix/enable parallel builds for Cactus Release Trivia -------------- - The name of the release branches is Cactus_4.0.0 - The list of thorns included in this release can be downloaded from http://svn.cactuscode.org/Utilities/branches/Cactus_4.0.0/ThornLists/Cactus_4.0.0.th - The Einstein Toolkit (www.einsteintoolkit.org) released their current version "Maxwell" today as well. - A thornlist containing a large collection of components of the just released Cactus framework 4.0.0, the just-released Einstein Toolkit "Maxwell", and the Alpaca project with thorns also marked as compiling with the new Cactus release is available from: https://svn.cactuscode.org/Utilities/branches/Cactus_4.0.0/ThornLists/Cactus_ET_2011_10_Alpaca.th