Re: [Freepooma-devel] Hidroforge

[Richard Guenther]

On Sat, 4 Mar 2006 address@hidden wrote:

> Dear developers of freepooma.

Hello Tenerife ;)

First let me apologize for not answering earlier - I had to think some
time on the suggestions I'd like to make.  Now, I definitely applaud
your move in creating a free project around hydrodynamic simulation
technology which will be more in spirit of Open Source projects than
what we have now in the Astrophysics community (I'm thinking of a few
tools available to the general public, but still developed/improved
independently of each other, like zeus, nirvana or flash).  I also
see a similar project, though not C++ centric, namely the Cactus code.

Your incentive to use FreePOOMA as a basis for a C++ hydrodynamic
code repository is probably the best you can do (apart from starting
from scratch) - at the time I did search for a basis to do hydro with
C++ there was no better tool/library available that allowed parallel
operation.  Still FreePOOMA is not perfect and you will experience its
rough edges, more or less, depending on the specific use.  I used
a modified FreePOOMA to implement a basic Nd HD code based on the
zeus numeric scheme, and a collegue of mine has added MHD support on
top of that.  I know of two other people exploring the possibility to
add radiative transfer to the supported equations.

I will offer you help as far as possible and am currently trying to
put our FreePOOMA modifications on a branch, so they are publically
visible.  As I'm now in the compiler business and no longer actively
doing simulations, my focus has somewhat changed in the last months,
so a lot of FreePOOMA improvement projects/ideas have stalled.

Following links on the page below you might find more information
on FreePOOMA and TraMP, the hydro code developed.  Also on
http://www.suse.de/~rguenther/tramp3d/ you can see compiler performance
monitored for a FreePOOMA application - one rough edge of FreePOOMA,
requiring appropriately optimizing compilers (gcc 4.1.0 is a good
choice, the FedoraCode 5 edition includes OpenMP support).

With best regards,
Richard.

--
Richard Guenther <richard dot guenther at uni-tuebingen dot de>
WWW: http://www.tat.physik.uni-tuebingen.de/~rguenth/