NEWS

Release notes for 2.0.10.

Another minor release keeping up with maintainence and third party package
updates.  These days I actually recommend just downloading a snapshot of the
source code repot, but I'll cut another interim release as well.

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Release notes for 2.0.9.

Mostly minor fixes and third party updates.  There is a fair amount of interim
development on new stuff like CRKSPH, but the main thrust of this release
is to update the third party library releases for easier building.

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Release notes for 2.0.8.

A number of minor fixes and third party updates.  There are two major changes
folks may notice in this release:

1.  The biggest change here from a users perspective is that the default restart
file format has been changed from gzipped ASCII files to silo.  If you have
older restart files you would like to use again this can be accomplished up
explicitly requesting the old restart file format when building the Spheral
controller in your script:

from GzipFileIO import GzipFileIO
control = SpheralController(...
                            restartFileConstructor = GzipFileIO,
                            ...)

2.  There is a new build system in Spheral now that builds all object files and
targets in a separate directory.  If you are building Spheral it's worth taking
a look at the updated build documentation in the source under doc/.

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Release notes for 2.0.7.

Yosemite (Mac OS X 10.10) compatibility.

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Release notes for 2.0.6.

Minor patch release, mostly just snapshoting our current state since the 2.0.4 
release is so old now it won't compile for most folks anymore.

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Release notes for 2.0.5.

- Many small changes (updates to libraries and such).

- Adding support for ANEOS if you have access to the ANEOS source (not supplied here).

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Release notes for 2.0.4.

Another minor patch release, with two changes:

1.  Updating how we're handling building rind cells for parallel Meshes.  The
    LineMesh and PolygonalMesh are now passing all unit tests serial and
    parallel.  PolyhedralMesh remains non-functional for now.

2.  Removed some more third party libs from the default set:
    - elementtree
    - PIL

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Release notes for 2.0.3.

This is a minor release, pretty much solely to update some of the third party
libraries to currently available verions (hdf5 1.8.10 and TAU 2.21.4).

Unfortunately this also brings along a very much undeveloped in progress version
of the Meshing/Tessellation technology, which is currently totally broken.  To
be fixed in a future release.

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Release note for 2.0.2.

This is a minor bugfix release of Spheral++.

- Added simple strain-alpha porosity model.

- Cleaned up the configure and build processes so they are successful out of the
  box on vanilla Linux.  Removed a lot of defunct compiler dependencies.

- Tested build on Mac OS/X 10.8 (Mountain Lion).

- Updated several third party libs to latest:
  - Boost 1.5.1
  - numpy 1.6.2
  - mpi4py 1.3

- Tessellation coding uses polytope, but is not correct in parallel cases
  yet.

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Release notes for 2.0.1.

This is the 2.0.1 release of the Spheral++ code, and is a minor revision of the
2.0 source.  The changes from 2.0 include:

- Updating some third party libs again (most notably Tau).  I've now modified
  how we include Tau in order to avoid this constant problem of our release
  being broken whenever Tau pushes out a new release.  Hopefully this will make
  things more stable.

- Suspending the maxNeighbor logic for updating the smoothing scale (the H
  tensor).  This was causing some stability problems in high resolution runs,
  particularly with adjacent materials that have very different node densities.
  This modification has made the H iteration *much* more stable, and now seems
  to converge well even for pathological cases.

- Generalized PhysicalConstants and it's usage, so it is now trivial to create
  new units on the fly.

- Note: the tessellation coding is not functioning correctly in this release, as
  we are in the midst of switching to using polytope to generate 2D and 3D
  tessellations.  This should not be a problem for anyone since that whole
  methodology is not yet out of the experimental phase.

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Release notes for 2.0.

This is the 2.0 release of the Spheral++ code.  The most important new
features are:

- This release includes solids modeling capability, using new analytic equations
  of state (such as Gruneisen, LinearPolynomial, and Tillotson), strength models
  (SteinbergGuinan), and incorporates damage modeling to follow failure and
  fracture.

- We have switched to the BSD open source license as part of the new release.
  See the included License.txt in the source.

- Many bugfixes, and up to date third party library configurations.

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A brief description of the changes in the 1.4.0 release of Spheral++.

The main algorithmic improvements included in this release:

1.  Compatible energy evolution option for the hydro, which ensures exact
    conservation of the total energy to machine roundoff.

2.  ASPH "ideal H" algorithm is now available, whereby we set the elliptical
    sampling volumes of ASPH directly from the local node distribution.

3.  New default parallel decomposition and boundary conditions using a Voronoi
    distribution of the nodes for each domain.  This seems to scale more
    effectively for large number of processors.

Infrastructure changes:

1.  Changed the python binding technology to pybindgen, significantly speeding
    up the build process.

2.  Adding WildMagic third party target to provide basic computational geometry
    functionality.

3.  Removed almost all third party sources from the distribution.  We use curl
    to download the needed pieces from their sources.  This *way* cuts down on
    the size of our distribution.

4.  Updated most of our third party libs to use the latest(ish) sources.

And of course lots of small bug fixes as we continue testing and evolving the
code.  :)


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2006 September 13
Release notes for 1.3.

This is mostly a catch-up release, since it's been so long since we cut the
last release.  New stuff includes:

1. Updated most of the third party packages.

2. Addition of the automated test system (ats), which allows a series of tests
   to be performed on Spheral++ which automatically determine pass/fail.  See
   the building/testing documentation for the procedure for invoking the
   automated tests.

3. Generalized the method by which physics packages set up and evolve their
   state.

4. Optimization improvements.

5. We now support building on Mac OS X machines.

6. Many bugfixes.

7.  A whole host of stuff over the past couple of years...

================================================================================
2004 April 17
Release notes for Optimization-1 release of Spheral++.

1. Some minor code changes that reduce our run-time by roughly 25%-30%.  This
   also makes the run time on the P4 based MCR cluster roughly equivalent to
   what we see on the new PowerPC chips in Berg.

2. Simplifying configuration by creating default compiler sets for different
   platforms, which can be selected with the --with-compilers configure flag.
   Hopefully this removes the onus of setting a bunch of individual compiler
   choices on suppported platforms.

3. Initial support for building with intel C++ (icc) on intel linux.

4. Adding TAU as a third party package, and implemented TAU timers throughout
   the code.  This also includes PAPI support via the TAU timers.

5. Adding a new optionally built package (CXXTests, built with --with-cxxtests)
   which builds C++ source for a set of unit test problems.  Currently these are
   the src/src/Field/tests/testNodeIterators.py and 
   src/src/Field/tests/testIndexFieldLists.py