Cactus is an

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use and view the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open source model is a decentrali ...

, problem-solving environment designed for

scientist A scientist is a person who Scientific method, researches to advance knowledge in an Branches of science, area of the natural sciences. In classical antiquity, there was no real ancient analog of a modern scientist. Instead, philosophers engag ...

s and

engineer Engineers, as practitioners of engineering, are professionals who Invention, invent, design, build, maintain and test machines, complex systems, structures, gadgets and materials. They aim to fulfill functional objectives and requirements while ...

s. Its modular structure enables parallel computation across different architectures and collaborative code development between different groups. Cactus originated in the academic

research Research is creative and systematic work undertaken to increase the stock of knowledge. It involves the collection, organization, and analysis of evidence to increase understanding of a topic, characterized by a particular attentiveness to ...

community, where it was developed and used over many years by a large international collaboration of

physicist A physicist is a scientist who specializes in the field of physics, which encompasses the interactions of matter and energy at all length and time scales in the physical universe. Physicists generally are interested in the root or ultimate cau ...

s and

computational scientist A computational scientist is a person skilled in scientific computing. This person is usually a scientist, a statistician, an applied mathematician, or an engineer who applies high-performance computing and sometimes cloud computing in different ...

s. The name

Cactus A cactus (: cacti, cactuses, or less commonly, cactus) is a member of the plant family Cactaceae (), a family of the order Caryophyllales comprising about 127 genera with some 1,750 known species. The word ''cactus'' derives, through Latin, ...

comes from the

design A design is the concept or proposal for an object, process, or system. The word ''design'' refers to something that is or has been intentionally created by a thinking agent, and is sometimes used to refer to the inherent nature of something ...

of a central core (or "flesh") which connects to application modules (or "thorns") through an extensible interface. Thorns can implement custom developed scientific or engineering applications, such as computational fluid dynamics. Other thorns from a standard computational toolkit provide a range of computational capabilities, such as parallel I/O, data distribution, or checkpointing. Cactus runs on many

architecture Architecture is the art and technique of designing and building, as distinguished from the skills associated with construction. It is both the process and the product of sketching, conceiving, planning, designing, and construction, constructi ...

s. Applications, developed on standard

workstation A workstation is a special computer designed for technical or computational science, scientific applications. Intended primarily to be used by a single user, they are commonly connected to a local area network and run multi-user operating syste ...

s or

laptop A laptop computer or notebook computer, also known as a laptop or notebook, is a small, portable personal computer (PC). Laptops typically have a Clamshell design, clamshell form factor (design), form factor with a flat-panel computer scree ...

s, can be seamlessly run on

cluster may refer to: Science and technology Astronomy * Cluster (spacecraft), constellation of four European Space Agency spacecraft * Cluster II (spacecraft), a European Space Agency mission to study the magnetosphere * Asteroid cluster, a small ...

s or

supercomputer A supercomputer is a type of computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instruc ...

s. Cactus provides easy access to many cutting-edge software technologies being developed in the academic research community, including the Globus Toolkit, HDF5 parallel file I/O, the PETSc scientific library,

adaptive mesh refinement In numerical analysis, adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) is a method of adapting the accuracy of a solution within certain sensitive or turbulent regions of simulation, dynamically and during the time the solution is being calculated. When solutions ...

, web interfaces, and advanced visualization tools.

History

Cactus was originally developed at the AEI, and is now developed jointly at AEI,

Cardiff University Cardiff University () is a public research university in Cardiff, Wales. It was established in 1883 as the University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire and became a founding college of the University of Wales in 1893. It was renamed Unive ...

, and the Center for Computation & Technology at

LSU Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, commonly referred to as Louisiana State University (LSU), is an American Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Baton Rouge, Louis ...

. There are several large packages built on Cactus, among others a general relativistic

spacetime In physics, spacetime, also called the space-time continuum, is a mathematical model that fuses the three dimensions of space and the one dimension of time into a single four-dimensional continuum. Spacetime diagrams are useful in visualiz ...

evolution code, an

driver (Carpet), and a general relativistic

hydrodynamics In physics, physical chemistry and engineering, fluid dynamics is a subdiscipline of fluid mechanics that describes the flow of fluids – liquids and gases. It has several subdisciplines, including (the study of air and other gases in ...

code (Whisky). Staff with the LSU Center for Computation & Technology, who were part of the original group at AEI who created Cactus, celebrated the program's 10th birthday in April 2007.

References

External links

* {{Official website, http://www.cactuscode.org/
Center for Computation & Technology

Numerical relativity group at the Albert Einstein Institute

www.whiskycode.org
Whisky — the EU Network GR Hydrodynamics code
einsteintoolkit.org
Einstein Toolkit Integrated development environments

History

See also

References

External links