[nmag-announce] update of 0.1 beta release (6481)
Hans Fangohr
we have released an update of nmag 0.1 beta (6481) at http://nmag.soton.ac.uk.
The major new feature is the support of the matrix compression library HLib to
represent the boundary element matrix. This reduces one of the memory
bottlenecks often found in finite element micromagnetic simulations. There are
two examples in the manual introducing the feature
(http://nmag.soton.ac.uk/nmag/0.1/manual/html/manual.html#compression-of-the-boundary-element-matrix-using-hlib)
We have also updated the Virtual machine to Debian 5.0 (Lenny), and to the
latest Nmag release (6481). The documentation for using the VMPlayer has been
extended (see http://nmag.soton.ac.uk/nmag/0.1/install/vmplayer.html). The
VMplayer now provides a shared folder which can be used to conveniently
exchange data between the real host operating system and the virtual linux
system that is by Nmag.
Changes in more detail:
Release 0.1 beta (6481) 22 December 2009
----------------------------------------
* New Features
* Support of Hierarchical Matrix compression for boundary element
matrix. This reduces the memory requirements for the boundary
element matrix substantially.
* Bugfixes/Improvements
* Minor improvements manual (Example 1 and 2, nmagpp, mayavi, 6170,
* updated MPI section)
* Updated plot.dat and plots for Example Hysteresis loop for thin disk to fix
documentation bug (thanks to Weiwei Wang for spotting this, 6326).
* The time stopping criteria are now more faithfully respected. A
new optional argument, 'exact_tstop', has been added to
'Simulation.advance_time' and to 'Simulation.set_params' to give
more freedom to the time integrator, in case performance is a
concern and exact time-stopping is not really needed.
* Updated packages to their latest stable release in the compile from source.
We are now using: Sundials 2.3.0, HDF5 1.6.10, Python 2.6.4,
pytables 2.1.2, NumPy 1.3.0, IPython 0.10.
This means an existing from-source installation *can not* be
updated using ``make update``.
* The regression tests can now be called with three different targets (6430):
make check : runs all fast tests (should complete in less than 5
minutes). This is a good test to run after compiling nmag (from source).
make checkmpi : runs mpi-related checks
make checkslow : runs tests that take longer (order of hours)
make checkall : run all tests together
(Previously, the mpi tests were part of target 'check'.)
* The virtual machine is now based on Debian Lenny (the current
stable version of Lenny).
* Interface changes
* We do not provide a Debian package for this release. The from source
compile works out of the box on Debian systems.
We'd like to thank all Nmag users for asking questions and reporting the
problems that have been fixed in this update.
You will help us to be able to maintain Nmag in the future if you
(i) cite "Thomas Fischbacher, Matteo Franchin, Giuliano Bordignon, and
Hans Fangohr. A Systematic Approach to Multiphysics Extensions of
Finite-Element-Based Micromagnetic Simulations: Nmag, in IEEE
Transactions on Magnetics, 43, 6, 2896-2898 (2007),
http://nmag.soton.ac.uk."
when you use Nmag for published work.
(ii) We are also interested in the use of Nmag for other research
(such as presented in posters, talks, design studies that do not
necessarily have associated publications): please drop an email to
nm...@soton.ac.uk for those.
Best wishes,
Hans (on behalf of the Nmag team)
--
Hans Fangohr
School of Engineering Sciences
University of Southampton
Phone: +44 (0) 238059 8345
Email: fan...@soton.ac.uk
http://www.soton.ac.uk/~fangohr