Fwd: v5.6.1 released

[Randall J LeVeque]

Dear Clawpack Users,

We are happy to announce that Clawpack 5.6.1 has been released.

Please also read below about the upcoming Clawpack 5.7.0, in particular the plan to only support Python 3 in future releases, the development of a GPU version of parts of Clawpack, and the new logo recently designed for Clawpack through our affiliation with NumFOCUS.

Version 5.6.1 contains several bug fixes and mostly minor improvements, a few of which are not entirely backward compatible.  In particular, some of the amrclaw and geoclaw routines have been sped up, and users of these packages should do
    make clobber; make new
in any example/application directory the first time recompiling with the new code.  

The timing statistics printed (wall time and CPU time) are also now more correct for multi-threaded jobs using OpenMP, and the plotting tools for displaying these timings have been improved, for some examples see
  http://staff.washington.edu/rjl/misc/timing_plots

See the release notes for more details and a summary of other changes:
  http://www.clawpack.org/release_5_6_1.html

How to get the latest version:

See
  http://www.clawpack.org/installing.html
for several installation options and the list of prerequisites.

Installing from a tarfile is not generally recommended, but one is available at:
  https://github.com/clawpack/clawpack/releases/
 
The tarfile is also permanently archived with a DOI at:
  https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3528429
So if you publish results (and also, we hope, the code used to generate them) based on this version, you can rest assured that it will always be available to your readers.  
 
Dockerhub and Pypi have also been updated.

Many thanks to everyone who contributed to this release. You can view all the commits, diffs, and contributors starting from the release notes page http://www.clawpack.org/release_5_6_1.html.  

GPU version:

A preliminary GPU version of 2d amrclaw and geoclaw has been developed by Xinsheng Qin.  This has not been fully merged with Clawpack for inclusion in this release, but for instructions on using it from the gpu branch of the git repositories, see
   http://www.clawpack.org/gpu.html
   
Dropping support for Python 2:

Starting with the next release 5.7.0 (within a couple months), we will no longer officially support Python 2.7 and some new updates or extensions may only work in Python 3.x.  This is consistent with the fact that Python 2.7 itself will not be maintained beyond January, 2020, and most package we rely on (e.g. numpy, matplotlib, jupyter) are also ceasing support for Python 2.7, see
   https://python3statement.org/
   
Hence we view Clawpack version 5.6.x as the end of the line for Python 2 support  (probably 5.6.1 unless there's a strong need to update this further).  Clawpack 5.6.x will continue to be available, of course, but in order to take advantage of future improvements to Clawpack (and most other Python packages) we strongly suggest that you start converting all of your codes to work in Python 3 if you haven't already.  Often this only requires changing print statements to print functions, but there are a few other changes.  See e.g.,
  https://docs.python.org/3/howto/pyporting.html
and there are many other online resources discussing the differences between Python 2 and 3.

Future GeoClaw Extensions:

Some more extensive modifications and extensions to GeoClaw capabilities are planned for version 5.7.0.  A preview of some of the new capabilities can be viewed in some rendered Jupyter notebooks available for viewing at
  http://www.clawpack.org/new_features_for_v5.7.0/
The notebooks and examples included in the associated git repository are still very much work in progress.  You are also welcome to try them out, but please be aware that they are still evolving.  Suggestions for improvement are welcome by raising an issue at
  https://github.com/clawpack/new_features_for_v5.7.0/issues
Pull requests to merge in various pieces of this work will appear in due course.

NumFOCUS:

Clawpack is now a NumFOCUS affiliated project.  According to their webpage, "The mission of NumFOCUS is to promote open practices in research, data, and scientific computing by serving as a fiscal sponsor for open source projects and organizing community-driven educational programs."  In particular, NumFOCUS invites proposals from its sponsored and affiliated projects for targeted small development grants (up to $5K) three times a year, so if you have a project in mind to help expand the capabilities of Clawpack, or to run a Clawpack tutorial or developers workshop, please let us know and we'll be happy to work with you to develop a proposal.

New Clawpack Logo:

Finally, we are pleased to announce that NumFOCUS generously provided us with a professional designer to design a new logo for Clawpack.  The new design is much cleaner, in keeping with the trend for other similar projects.  It consists of a set of nested C's, meant to suggest waves propagating outward (e.g. acoustic waves reflected from a cylinder).  The new logo will officially be launched with Version 5.7.0, but you can see it on the NumFOCUS affiliated projects page, and also on the dev-version of the documentation, where we also start documenting any new features as PR's get merged into the master branch.

Happy Computing,
  The Clawpack Development Team