The Cactus Code is an open source problem solving environment designed for scientists and engineers. It has a modular structure which facilitates parallel computation across different architectures and collaborative code development between different groups. The name Cactus comes from the design of a central core (or flesh) which connections to application or infrastructure modules (or thorns) through an extensible interface.

Parallelism and portability are achieved by hiding the driver layer, and other features such as the I/O system, under a simple abstraction API. This API supports C/C++ and F77/F90 programming languages for modules.

Cactus provides easy access to many cutting edge software technologies such as the Globus Metacomputing Toolkit, HDF5 or FlexIO parallel file I/O, the PETSc scientific computing library, adaptive mesh refinement, and remote steering.

This talk will give an introduction to Cactus and the tools and capabilities it supplies, describing the design requirements, their realization, and future development plans.

Snacks will be provided.

See Conundrum Talks for more information about this series.