[CIG-LONG] Gale 1.3.0

[Walter Landry]

Greetings,

I am pleased to announce the release of Gale 1.3.0, an implicit finite
element code for the long term tectonics community.  This latest
release features more benchmarks, thoroughly tested friction
implementations, and a number of robustness and memory fixes.  You
will probably have to make minor changes to your old input files to
use them in this release.  See the MIGRATION file for details.

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
----------------------------------

* Nodal pressures have been introduced, eliminating the even-odd
  instability seen in the regular pressure solution.  These pressures
  are now used for calculating yielding and friction.  This will
  require anyone using those features to make some minor changes to their
  input files (see the file MIGRATION for details).
* Results for all of the Geomod 2004 benchmarks are now included and
  described in the manual.
* The vtk output for particles now includes a material index, making
  it easy to distinguish between materials with the same properties
  for visualization.
* Fixing internal degrees of freedom with ShapeVC's is now better
  documented in the manual, including tips on how to use them for
  boundary conditions.
* It is now possible to specify both the upper and lower values for
  StepFunction.
* A bug has been fixed in the diffusion example for surface processes.
* Some bugs in the static and kinetic friction boundary conditions
  have been fixed, and they are now thoroughly tested and benchmarked.
* A minor bug in the Mohr Coulomb yielding model has been fixed.  It
  has also been made more robust and now works with stiff materials.
* A number of memory bugs have been fixed.

The current goals are:

  * Merge Gale back with the VPAC code.  This should give Gale multigrid
    solvers, restart capability, and improved PETSc compatibility.
  * Better normal stress boundary conditions
  * Deformed lower boundaries
  * Interface with custom surface process models in parallel
  * Implement the Geomod 2008 benchmarks