Cactus: Issues for Sustainable Simulation Software
This is an incremental analysis of a specific simulation software framework, relevant for developers and users in high-performance computing.
The paper examines the Cactus Framework's evolution since 1996, highlighting its adaptability to hardware changes and community growth, and discusses future sustainability challenges based on past lessons.
The Cactus Framework is an open-source, modular, portable programming environment for the collaborative development and deployment of scientific applications using high-performance computing. Its roots reach back to 1996 at the National Center for Supercomputer Applications and the Albert Einstein Institute in Germany, where its development jumpstarted. Since then, the Cactus framework has witnessed major changes in hardware infrastructure as well as its own community. This paper describes its endurance through these past changes and, drawing upon lessons from its past, also discusses future