Release Announcement

We are pleased to announce the ninth release (code name "Wheeler") of the Einstein Toolkit, an open, community developed software infrastructure for relativistic astrophysics. This release includes various improvements to the Cactus flesh, Carpet and GRHydro. In addition, bug fixes accumulated since the previous release in November 2013 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 including CactusEinstein, the Carpet AMR infrastructure and the relativistic magneto-hydrodynamics code GRHydro. 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 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
  • Removed components
    • ADM
    • LegoExcision
  • Deprecated components (still included, but don't use for new code)
    • ADMConstraints (use ML_ADMConstraints instead)
    • ADMCoupling
    • ADMMacros
    • DistortedBHIVP
    • IDAxiBrillBH
    • IDAxiOddBrillBH
    • RotatingDBHIVP
  • New components:
    • CactusExamples: 10 small example thorns
    • TestMoL
    • CarpetExtra: 10 test thorns
    • IllinoisGRMHD (not enabled by default, proposed for the next release)
  • Simfactory
    • updates to many machines
  • Cactus flesh:
    • Cactus complex number arithmetic functions are deprecated
    • Drop explicit support for Fortran 77 in Cactus
    • Prevent Cactus from choking on very large parameter files
    • Update to work with Chemora. Not currently used by regular Cactus.
    • The workaround CCTK_DISABLE_RESTRICT for bugs in the Intel compiler is no longer necessary for version newer or equal 14, which is now taken into account.
    • Support for Clang on OSX
  • MoL: Automatically count number of evolved variables
  • ADMConstraints: remove support for conformal metrics
  • EOS_Omni: new c++ backend
  • GRHydro
    • rewrite major parts of the code in c++, both versions are still included, the c++ version is not enabled by default yet (see parameter use_cxx_code). The default will change for the next release and the Fortran version will be removed after that.
    • Lots of smaller changes and bug fixes
  • Kranc:
    • Use a namespace to protect certain thorn functions; this means that calculations can no longer be named the same as the thorn
    • Add the ability to merge arbitrary files into the thorn at Kranc time (e.g. for docs, tests)
    • Add ability to tile loops over grids
    • Add ability to count floating point operations in a calculation
    • Display a function call backtrace when errors are detected during running Kranc
    • Correct accidental interchange of sinh and cosh in vectorised code
    • Substantial internal code cleanup and reorganization; no intentional changes affecting the user as a result
    • Improvements to Chemora support (GPUs)
    • Improvements to script language support
    • Make GFOffset available to calculations
    • Improve support for xTensor as an alternative to TensorTools
    • Include some regression tests for Kranc
    • Include some unit tests for Kranc
    • Make internal code generation significantly more robust
    • Remove old code, including obsolete Fortran code generation which hasn't been used or worked for a long time
    • Remove almost all dependence on GenericFD; required code is now embedded in the generated thorn
    • Many other small changes
  • McLachlan: optimizations
  • Carpet
    • Changes to support accelerators (not used by default)
    • CarpetRegrid2: support Parity Symmetry thorn
    • Carpet: Apply boundary conditions during restricting
    • Include string null terminator in HDF5 attributes (only important if you happen to read them in your own scripts)
  • How to upgrade from Noether (ET_2013_11)

To upgrade from the previous release, use GetComponents with the new thornlist 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.
  • Recovering with Carpet: Carpet stores metadata (such as the simulation time) only for Carpet::max_timelevels time levels, although it is possible to allocate more time levels. These additional time levels then cannot be recovered; the symptom is an assertion failure during recovery. The solution is to either increase Carpet::max_timelevels, or to decrease the number of active time levels.
  • Machine notes

Supported (tested) machines include:

  • Default Debian, Suse and Fedora installations
  • Bethe
  • Bluewaters *
  • Carver
  • Datura
  • Gordon
  • Hopper
  • Loewe
  • Lonestar *
  • Supermike II
  • Nvidia *
  • Orca *
  • Philip
  • Queenbee
  • Shelob
  • Stampede (CPU)
  • Supermuc
  • Titan
  • Trestles
  • Zwicky

A * means that a small number of tests still fail on that machine. All tests pass on the other machines.

  • LoneStar and Stampede: defs.local.ini needs to have sourcebasedir = $WORK and basedir = $SCRATCH/simulations configured for this machine. You need to determine $WORK and $SCRATCH by logging in to the machine.

All repositories participating in this release carry a branch ET_2014_05 marking this release. These release branches will be updated if severe errors are found.

The "Wheeler" Release Team on behalf of the Einstein Toolkit Consortium (2014-05-21)

   Peter Diener
   Roland Haas
   Ian Hinder
   Frank Löffler
   Bruno C. Mundim
   Erik Schnetter

May 21, 2014