[Users] nature of Cactus

[David Rideout]

Jan,

I use Cactus for discrete quantum gravity computations, which bear
little resemblance to simulations on a uniform lattice.  The 1d "grid
arrays" are really quite general objects -- I use them to store
partial order relations and some information regarding how an abstract
graph embeds into a 3 dimensional manifold.  In addition I have
developed a prototype "unstructured mesh driver" in Cactus, which in
principle allows computations on extremely general structures.  Such
things are heavily used in computational fluid dynamics.

The documentation is indeed written from the perspective of finite
difference solutions of PDEs on a regular lattice, so it is worded
accordingly.  This needn't put you off from using it for more general
computations, however.  I understand that Cactus 5 is directed toward
providing a more general framework, e.g. by allowing abstract data
types beyond CCTK_REAL, CCTK_INT, etc.  This version may remove some
of the assumptions of finite differencing on a regular lattice from
the documentation.

I'd be happy to discuss your applications in more detail if you like.

Regards,
David Rideout

On 11/10/06, Jan Hegewald <hegewald at cab.bau.tu-bs.de> wrote:
> Hello all,
> I am new to Cactus and it is not clear to me where the limitations of
> Cactus are.
> The Cactus users guide sometime talks about a "grid" and "grid
> points" etc. From this I got the impression that thorns always
> operate on some kind of uniform lattice. Is that true?
> I am looking for a framework which can connect different legacy
> simulators, e.g. a car traffic simulation and a pedestrian movement
> simulation. Is Cactus suited for such things?
>
> Many TIA,
> -- Jan
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