[Users] Cactus News and Supercomputing 2007

[Allen Gabrielle]

Greetings to all Cactus users !

It has been quite some time since the last Cactus release (Cactus 4.0  
Beta 15). Since then, besides bug fixing, user support and enjoying  
life, we have been working to nurture a broader range of application  
areas using Cactus, and secure funding for infrastructure and  
application development.

This message is to update everyone on our recent progress, and starts  
a new phase of more regular newsletters.

New Grants:

o  ALPACA: NSF award under the Software Development for  
Cyberinfrastructure (SDCI) program to develop tools in Cactus for  
application level performance and correctness analysis. Under this  
award we will provide:
	- new fault tolerant capabilities
	- new performance monitoring capabilities
	- new interactive debugging capabilities
	- new user friendly interfaces

o XiRel: NSF award under the Physics at the Information Frontier (PIF)  
solitication for next generation infrastructure for numerial  
relativity. With our good colleagues at RIT and Penn State this award  
will
	- develop a highly scalable, efficient and accurate adaptive mesh  
refinement layer based on the existing Carpet driver,
	- provide improved community support and infrastructure
	- lead towards community toolkits and data services for numerical  
relativity

o PARCA: NASA STTR award to provide a PARAMESH interface in Cactus.  
With our good colleagues at Decisive Analytics Corporation (DAC), UMD,  
and NASA Goddard this award will develop a highly scalable, efficient  
and accurate adaptive mesh refinement driver based on PARAMESH.

o UCoMS: DOE award to develop grid community scenarios in petroleum  
engineering. Under this award we are developing a reservoir simulator  
in Cactus which will allow for high throughput flow simulations. We  
will also be developing tools for optimization and inverse modeling.

o CyberTools: This large NSF award is to develop cyberinfrastructure  
across the state of Louisiana. Cactus is involved as an application  
framework for multiscale fluid dynamics and molecular dynamics, and  
with this award we will extend our Cactus CFD Toolkit.

o CoMI: DOD award to develop a coastal modeling framework for studying  
the Louisiana coastal region, building on the CFD toolkit.

o DynaCode: NSF award to develop dynamic data driven application  
systems based around real time coastal scenarios. This award is  
funding the development of Cactus Version 5 which will provide  
capabilities for more dynamic scheduling and adaption.

o AstroGrid-D: A research project funded by the German Ministry for  
Education and Research to make astrophysical codes ready for the Grid.  
For Cactus, which is one of the application use cases in AstroGrid-D,  
grid-enabled simulation monitoring and steering methods and a Cactus  
user portal are being developed.

New Application Areas:

Through different grants and projects, we are now working with new  
applications in coastal modeling, computational fluid dynamics,  
reservoir simulations, and shrimp modeling.

New People:

o We have recently been joined by Jian Tao, a soon to be PhD in  
computational astrophysics from Washington University, who will be  
working primarily on adaptive mesh refinement in Cactus.

o Maciej Brodowicz from CCT is strengthening our tools development and  
performance analysis.

o LSU students Junaid Ahmed and Tyler Barker have joined the team to  
help with the development of Eclipse interfaces for Cactus.

o Prof Mayank Tyagi (Petroleum Engineering), Prof Chris White  
(Petroleum Engineering) and Prof Jim Chen (Civil Engineering) from LSU  
are helping in developing new application areas using Cactus.

Supercomputing 2007:

A number of us will be in Reno next week for SC07. Cactus demos will  
be given at the LSU booth, please come and say hello:

1) Erik Schnetter will show tools for petascale computing and  Cactus
     1:30 PM, Tuesday, 13 November 2007 1:00 PM, Thursday, 15 November  
2007
2) The Cactus "Black Oil" application will run as part of a  
distributed workflow showing the use of Ensemble Kalman Filters in the  
Petroleum Engineering demo
     1:00 PM, Tuesday, 13 November 2007 11:00 AM, Wednesday, 14  
November 2007
3) Mayank's CFD Toolkit demo will show basic functionality in the  
toolkit and its use for coastal and reservoir simulations
     11:00 AM, Thursday, 15 November 2007
4) Ed Seidel will demonstrate the LONI environment, including showing  
Cactus scaling to over 4000 processors of the new 50TF Queen Bee machine
      2:30 PM, Wednesday, 14 November 2007
5) Burkhard Zink will talk about his astrophysics work using Cactus
     3:30 PM, Wednesday, 14 November 2007

Any suggestions and ideas with regard to the future development of  
Cactus would be appreciated.

Thanks again for your support !

Sincerely, Cactus team