We are pleased to announce release 4.1.0 of the Cactus computational toolkit, an open source problem solving environment designed for scientists and engineers. This release includes various changes to the flesh, support for new architectures and comes bundled with supporting tools like GetComponents and Simfactory. Also, MPI configuration within the flesh is now deprecated in favor of the thorn MPI in ExternalLibraries. In addition, bug fixes accumulated since the previous release in October 2011 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 1212401/1212426/1212433/1212460, 0903973/0903782/0904015 (CIGR), and also by NSF 0905046/0941653 (PetaCactus) and 0710874 (LONI Grid). The "4.1.0" Release Team on behalf of the Cactus Framework Group (2012-11-08) Significant Changes ------------------- - GetComponents: - anonymous checkout is now used by default. Use --no-anonymous for authenticated checkouts - make full clone default - simfactory - updates of various machine configurations - Replace large files by hard links during cleanup - Basic configuration file for ubuntu / debian / fedora desktops. - utils: syntax highlight for vim and emacs - Cactus flesh: - grid functions may be padded, i.e. the driver may allocate more grid points than requested. The allocated size of grid functions can be accessed using cctk_ash. Note however, that this can be different from cctk_lsh. The latter is that part (size) of cctk_ash that is used within a simulation, i.e. that was set as simulation size via parameters. This is necessary for vectorization where the size of arrays needs to be a multiple of some number, but the simulation domain might not be. - correctly detect circular schedule items - replace CCTK_RESTRICT by restrict, which is now defined by the flesh - Change per thorn -DTHORN_IS_xxx to a per thorn -I bindings/include/xxx - Correct error in determining dependencies - have -reconfig target execute -cleandeps after reconfiguration - add parameters to reverse un-enforced Cactus schedule ordering - Move MPI support from flesh to a thorn - Support various new Darwin minor versions - increase default value of RELTOL to 1e-12 - Enforce that arrangement names are legal C identifiers - Update Fortran API for CCTK_LOOP macros - Add autoconf check whether C99 is supported (now required) - New option -P (--exit-after-param-check) to exit after param check - allow ${parfile} in parameter files to allow ${parfile}/subdir Release Trivia -------------- - The name of the release branches is Cactus_4.1.0 - The list of thorns included in this release can be downloaded from http://svn.cactuscode.org/Utilities/branches/Cactus_4.1.0/ThornLists/Cactus_4.1.0.th - The Einstein Toolkit (www.einsteintoolkit.org) released their current version "Ørsted" today as well.