[CIG-ALL] Gale 1.2.1

[Walter Landry]

Greetings,

I am pleased to announce the release of Gale 1.2.1, an implicit finite
element code for the long term tectonics community.  This latest
release features stress boundaries normal to the boundary.  This can
be used to simulate the supporting force of material outside the
simulation while still allowing material to flow in or out.  Also,
there is now extensive documentation on how to set up thermal
problems.

You can download binaries or the source code from

   http://geodynamics.org/cig/software/packages/long/gale/

Installation instructions are in the bundled README and INSTALL files.

Cheers,
Walter Landry
walter at geodynamics.org

Release Notes

* Thermal problems are now documented, including a cookbook example.
* Normal stress boundaries which simulate the effect of a supporting
  material now work and are documented.
* Interfacing with custom surface process models works in serial.
* You may now affect the time step chosen by Gale with the parameter dtFactor.
* There is now a ShearZ function in the list of Standard Condition Functions.
* A bug that prevented the windows binary from working has been fixed.
* A bug in stress boundary conditions which caused applied stresses to
  be too large by a factor of 2 or 4 has been fixed.
* A bug where Gale would run out of memory if reading large input
  files has been fixed.
* Gale is known to work, although not necessarily scale, up to 512 processors.

The current goals are to work on

  * Frictional boundary conditions
  * Deformed lower boundaries
  * Interface with custom surface process models in parallel