All of us from the old Pooma Team left LANL at around the same time, for various reasons. When we knew we would all be leaving, we set things up so that an outside company could continue to support Pooma as an open-source code development project. So that is what has happened. CodeSourcery has a contract with LANL to provide continuing maintenance and some specific new features that LANL needs for some of their application codes. CodeSourcery has subcontracted the work to me and a few other former Pooma Team members, plus a few new guys who are terrific C++ programmers. I am only contributing a very modest number of hours per week, since my research at Caltech keeps me very busy.
We released Pooma 2.3 just before leaving LANL last year, and it contained a new version of our Field abstraction (the main difference is run-time centering information instead of a compile-time template parameter). So I've been working on getting the Particles classes to work with this new Field class so that the old one can be abandoned. The main goals of Pooma 2.4 are to completely flesh out the new Field abstraction and to get the use of MPI parallelism and thread-based parallelism to work simultaneously. (Right now, you can only use MPI or threads, but not both.) We have a new website at http://pooma.codesourcery.com that will keep you up-to-date with the latest on Pooma. I'm glad to see that Pooma is at least being polished up a bit, and I hope that CodeSourcery can develop a user base outside LANL that might also contribute to its development. The LANL support is only short-term, so we'd like to have the open-source community support it in the future, but we'll just have to see what happens.
| Dr. Julian C. Cummings | E-mail: cummings@cacr.caltech.edu |
| California Institute of Technology | Phone: 626-395-2543 |
| 1200 E. California Blvd. | Fax: 626-584-5917 |
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