Alpaca: Related Projects and Tools

Related Projects
Cactus
Alpaca is designed primarily for Cactus computational framework, which is a heterogeneous collection of open source codes for solving time-dependent partial differential equations. It was designed in academic research community to facilitate parallel computation across different architectures and collaborative code development between different (competing!) groups. Cactus has highly modular structure, achieving an efficient multiplication of possibilities, provided by individual modules (called "thorns" in Cactus terminology). One of the most important features of Cactus is its rule-based high-level scheduler, where individual thorns can schedule their method functions. Cactus was developed and used over many years by a large international collaboration of physicists and computational scientists.
Carpet
Carpet is an adaptive mesh refinement and multi-patch driver for the Cactus Framework. Carpet acts as driver layer providing adaptive mesh refinement, multi-patch capability, as well as parallelisation and efficient I/O.

Carpet was created in 2001 by Erik Schnetter at the TAT (Theoretische Astrophysik Tübingen) and subsequently brought into production use by Erik Schnetter, Scott Hawley, and Ian Hawke at the AEI (Max-Planck-Institut für Gravitationsphysik, Albert-Einstein-Institut). Carpet is currently maintained at the CCT (Center for Computation and Technology) at LSU.
ParCa
The goal of the Parca project is to provide the adaptive mesh refinement capabilities of the Paramesh computational libraries to Cactus users. This is achieved by writing a driver thorn for Cactus that uses calls to the Paramesh libraries internally.
XiRel
(from XiRel website:) XiRel is project, focused on developing a highly scalable, efficient and accurate adaptive mesh refinement layer for the Cactus Framework, based on the Carpet driver, and optimized and supported for numerical relativitists studying the physics of black holes, neutron stars and gravitational waves. New tools will be distributed as part of a freely available Einstein Toolkit providing an open code for black hole simulations and incorporating mechanisms to encourage code sharing, verification, and validation.
Related Tools

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