Current and Future Development

On our List

• Review of included header files
• More general coordinate system thorns (eg spherical polars)
• IO callback infrastructure for triggering IO
• Flesh support for unstructured grids, and drivers for finite volumes and finite elements
• Including particle method and SPH drivers
• Multipatch and multiblock drivers and flesh support
• Generic language support, so can have thorns in Java, Perl, Python.
• Creation of C++ classes for C++ thorns (cGH will appear as class with methods)
• Declaration of state of variables in interface.ccl
• Optimisation of PUGH MPI communication layer (overlapping communications)
• Extension of toolkit thorns to any spatial dimension
• Compilation features to allow you to install Cactus on a system and just provide your own thorns. Also .cactusrc local configuration file.
• Driver layers to replicate the functionality of our MPI based domain decomposition driver (CactusPUGH/PUGH) using different communication layers. More driver layers in Cactus would make it possible to compare efficiency etc. for different paradigms on different architectures, eg PVM, SHMEM.
• Configuration file (.ccl) emacs mode

Specifications

In this section we are starting to gather together specifications for new features which we are either implementing into Cactus, are planning to implement, or are hoping that someone will volunteer to implement.

If you would like to be involved in any of these projects, or have comments on the specifications, please contact the development mailing list at developers@cactuscode.org (make sure to subscribe to this list as well!), or the Cactus Team at cactusmaint@cactuscode.org

Being implemented now
Specifications for features we are adding right now, if you have comments or suggestions please contact us, or the developers mailing list right away!

User Customisation
Surface Descriptions

Either Cactus 4.0 or Cactus 4.1
Features that we would like to be adding immediately, although man/woman-power constraints might put them off till later. Volunteers needed!!

Multiple Grid Hierarchies
Size of Fortran Integer
Email thorn and information server
Input of grid variables

To be implemented in Cactus 4.1

Multi-Model
Cactus Communication Infrastructure (CCI).
Support for unstructured grids
Routine Description Via The Scheduler
Runtime grid variable aliasing.

Archive
This archive contains specifications for features which have been implemented.
Note that these specs aren't updated anymore. Please refer to the Cactus UsersGuide and ThornGuide for up-to-date information about their implementation.

Coordinate problems
Termination conditions
Einstein hierachy tidy up
Accumulator Parameters
Thorn Configuration Scripts
Thorn function aliasing
Symmetries version 2 (version 1)
Boundary condition handling
New Global Interpolation Interface version 4 (version 1) (version 2) (version 3)
CCTK Hyperslab API
Sep 2002 Local Interpolation Interface
Key/Value look-up tables
Feb. 2001 version of interpolation interfaces
Parameter checking
TimeLevel problems
Final library list in link line