[CIG-SHORT] PyLith News, including PyLith Modeling Tutorial, June 24-28, 2013

[Brad Aagaard]

News from the PyLith development team (Brad Aagaard, Matt Knepley, and 
Charles Williams)

PyLith Modeling Tutorial, June 24-28, 2013.

We will be conducting a PyLith Modeling Tutorial June 24-28, 2013. Note 
that this is a week later than what we have been doing and two weeks 
later than we originally scheduled. This will be a *virtual* workshop 
with the same format as in 2011. We will hold 2-hr morning and afternoon 
sessions on Mon Jun 24, Wed Jun 26, and Fri Jun 28. There will be two 
parallel schedules to accommodate a wide variety of time zones- one 
schedule for people in the Americas and Europe and one schedule for 
people in eastern Asia and the western Pacific. We will be setting up 
the web pages for the workshop in the next week and will send out 
another announcement soon with registration information.

PyLith User Resources

We have created a webpage with links to several resources that are
useful for PyLith users. You may want to make this your PyLith bookmark. 
  We welcome suggestions on what other information you would find helpful.
http://www.geodynamics.org/cig/software/pylith/user_resources

Publications from PyLith Users

If you have published a paper that made use of PyLith, please submit the 
publication information via our simple web form available from
http://www.geodynamics.org/cig/software/pylith/user_resources/pubs_science
This will help us obtain continued funding for development of PyLith as
well as advertise your work to other members of the community.

Status of PyLith 2.0

We are hard at work doing a major overhaul of the finite-element data 
structures used in PyLith. We are transitioning from Sieve data 
structures to DMPlex data structures that will be part of mainstream 
PETSc. We expect the new data structures to significantly reduce memory 
use in large parallel simulations. In developing these new data 
structures, Matt Knepley has laid the foundation for use of higher order 
basis functions and extending PyLith to handle multiphysics simulations. 
We hope to have higher order basis functions fully functional and tested 
for version 2.0.

New PETSc code repositories

On March 12, 2013, PETSc switched to using the git version control 
system. This reflects a change in the PETSc development workflow that 
should result in a much more stable (robust) development version. Matt 
Knepley created a special PETSc branch for PyLith (knepley/pylith). This 
branch serves as the PETSc development branch for PyLith. Anyone using 
the development version of PyLith (and PETSc) should switch to the PETSc 
git repositories and use this branch. We will be updating the PyLith 
installer to use this workflow. The PyLith documentation will also be 
updated accordingly.