Detailed Release Announcement

Unnamed (ET_2016_11)

NOTE: This release text is work in progress, meant for an upcoming release of the Einstein Toolkit, not of an already released version.

We are pleased to announce the fourteenth release (code name "Unnamed") of the Einstein Toolkit, an open, community developed software infrastructure for relativistic astrophysics. This release includes, among other things, TODO. In addition, bug fixes accumulated since the previous release in May 2016 have been included.

The Einstein Toolkit is a collection of software components and tools for simulating and analyzing general relativistic astrophysical systems that builds on numerous software efforts in the numerical relativity community. This includes CactusEinstein, the Carpet AMR infrastructure and the relativistic magneto-hydrodynamics codes GRHydro and IllinoisGRMHD. For parts of the toolkit, the Cactus Framework is used as the underlying computational infrastructure providing large-scale parallelization, general computational components, and a model for collaborative, portable code development. The toolkit includes modules to build complete codes for simulating black hole spacetimes as well as systems governed by relativistic magneto-hydrodynamics.

The Einstein Toolkit uses a distributed software model and its different modules are developed, distributed, and supported either by the core team of Einstein Toolkit Maintainers, or by individual groups. Where modules are provided by external groups, the Einstein Toolkit Maintainers provide quality control for modules for inclusion in the toolkit and help coordinate support. The Einstein Toolkit Maintainers currently involve postdocs, staff and faculty from six different institutions, and host weekly meetings that are open for anyone to join in.

Guiding principles for the design and implementation of the toolkit include: open, community-driven software development; well thought out and stable interfaces; separation of physics software from computational science infrastructure; provision of complete working production code; training and education for a new generation of researchers.

For more information about using or contributing to the Einstein Toolkit, or to join the Einstein Toolkit Consortium, please visit our web pages at <http://einsteintoolkit.org>.

The Einstein Toolkit is primarily supported by NSF 1212401/1212426/1212433/1212460 (Einstein Toolkit), and also by 0905046/0941653 (PetaCactus) and 0710874 (LONI Grid).

The Einstein Toolkit contains about 200 regression test cases. On a large portion of the tested machines, almost all of these test suites pass, using both MPI and OpenMP parallelization. The changes between this and the previous release include:

   Larger changes since last release

   How to upgrade from Brahe (ET_2016_05)

To upgrade from the previous release, use GetComponents with the new component list to check out the new version.

See the Download page on the Einstein Toolkit website for download instructions.

   Remaining issues with this release

   Certain machines need to be configured specially in Simfactory because the remote directories cannot be determined automatically just from the user name. See the Machine notes below.

Older Releases

The final release information of older releases can be found [here].