Download Cactus
License
The Cactus Code is (C) Copyrighted by the individual Authors and distributed under the GNU Lesser General Public License. Most of the computational packages that come with it follow this license, but the authors of any thorn are free to follow any licensing they deem appropriate as long as they state it explicitly in their thorn distribution.
Getting the Code
Cactus is maintained using Subversion. The preferred method is to use the GetComponents script along with a thornlist as described below. We maintain a page of basic thornlists, or you can use your own customized thornlist.
Download GetComponents
and make sure it is executable.
wget http://www.cactuscode.org/download/GetComponents
chmod a+x GetComponents
To checkout the Cactus flesh and required thorns, choose and save
one of our ThornLists, or provide your own,
and issue the command:
./GetComponents <thornlist-name>
Subversion Repositories
Instead of using the GetComponents script, you can also check out Cactus and the Cactus Computational Toolkit using svn commands or another Subversion client. The main Cactus Subversion Server (svn.cactuscode.org) hosts several different repositories including different branches for the stable and development versions of Cactus.
The Subversion server can be use anonymously to checkout Cactus components. It supports both http and https connections, but only https can be used for authenticated logins, e.g. for commits to the repositories.
Check out the Cactus flesh:
svn co http://svn.cactuscode.org/flesh/trunk Cactus
Move to the arrangements directory of the Cactus installation and
install the required arrangements and thorns:
cd Cactus/arrangements
If you are using thorns other than those in the standard Cactus
distributions you will need to know the details for downloading or
checking them out. Here we just describe checking out from the
Cactus distribution.
To checkout individual thorns (e.g. see our standard
ThornLists):
svn co http://svn.cactuscode.org/arrangements/<arrangement>/<thorn>/trunk <thorn>
Requirements
The Cactus Code is very portable. The requirements section of the User's guide contains a list of the specific requirements, but basically, the code needs some freely available utilities (gmake, Perl) and an ANSI C/C++ compiler for building the flesh infrastructure. The core computational toolkit thorns are mainly written in C (with a couple of exceptions in C++). Some application or example thorns also require a Fortran 90 compiler although you only need F77 to run the tutorial. The drivers shipped in the current release use the Message Passing Interface (MPI) for parallelization of the code across multiple processors or machines. Both native and freely available (e.g. MPICH, LAM) implementations are supported.