Release 22.06

22.06

• castro.stopping_criterion_field and castro.stopping_criterion_value have
  been added; these allow you to stop the simulation once a certain threshold
  has been exceeded (for example, if the temperature gets too hot). (#2209)

• The option castro.show_center_of_mass has been removed. If castro.v = 1
  and castro.sum_interval > 0, then the center of mass will automatically
  be included with the other diagnostic sums that are displayed. (#2176)

• The option castro.state_in_rotating_frame has been removed. The default
  behavior continues to be that when rotation is being used, fluid variables
  are measured with respect to the rotating frame. (#2172)

• The default for use_pslope has been changed to 0 -- disabling this.
  use_pslope enables reconstruction that knows about HSE for the PLM
  (castro.ppm_type = 0) implementation. Since that method is not the
  default, it is unlikely that this has been used. This change is being
  done to allow for a PPM implementation to be added without changing
  the default behavior of that method. (#2205)

• The castro.use_pslope functionality to well-balance HSE has been
  extended to PPM (#2202)

Release 22.05

• A new option castro.hydro_memory_footprint_ratio has been added which
  can help limit the amount of memory used in GPU builds. (#2153)

• In #1379, for the 21.04 release, Castro added a check that issued
  an abort if any species mass fraction was found to be invalid (defined
  by being less than -0.01 or greater than 1.01). This helps us catch
  unintended code errors that do not properly normalize updates to the
  species. (This was originally only enabled for CPU builds, but in the
  22.04 release was extended for GPU builds, as noted below.) However,
  as observed in #2096, this issue can legitimately be triggered in
  regions of sharp composition and density gradients as an unavoidable
  consequence of how the multi-dimensional CTU solver is designed. An
  example would be a helium shell around a C/O white dwarf at low to
  moderate spatial resolution. This was causing the code to abort in
  a couple of science problems, so several improvements were added to
  the code in this release to address it. In #2121, we turned this
  situation into a retry after a hydro update rather than an abort,
  so that the code has more chances to recover by doing an advance
  with a smaller timestep. However, this will not always allow you
  to recover, particularly if you are in an area where density resets
  are occurring and/or you are using castro.limit_fluxes_on_small_dens,
  so we also added a new option castro.abundance_failure_rho_cutoff in
  #2124, which allows you to set a density threshold below which invalid
  mass fractions will be silently ignored (and reset to valid values
  between 0 and 1). We also turned the invalid mass fraction threshold
  into a runtime parameter castro.abundance_failure_tolerance (#2131),
  so that you can optionally loosen or tighten the strictness of this
  check.

  Since this scenario was sometimes occurring during the reflux step
  in AMR simulations, we also improved the reflux code to avoid doing
  the flux correction locally in zones where it would cause an invalid
  mass fraction (#2123).

  While doing these changes we noticed also that the option
  castro.limit_fluxes_on_small_dens was sometimes inadvertently
  aggravating this problem by creating physically implausible fluxes of
  the species, so we simplified the algorithm to avoid that. (#2134)

• The option castro.limit_fluxes_on_large_vel has been removed. (#2132)

Release 22.04

Castro 22.04

Release 22.03

Castro 22.03

Release 22.02

Castro 22.02

Release 22.01

Castro 22.01

Release 21.12

Castro 21.12

Release 21.11

Castro 21.11

Release 21.10

21.10

• A new option, castro.drive_initial_convection was added that
  uses the temperature interpolated from the initial model instead
  of the value on the grid to call the reactions. This helps
  prevent a reactive zone from burning in place before a convective
  velocity field is established to carry off the energy.

• The burn_weights are no longer stored by default in the plotfile.
  Instead, they are now enabled by setting
  castro.store_burn_weights=1. Additionally, they now give a better
  estimate of the cost for the numerical Jacobian (#1946, #1949)

• castro.change_max is now required to be greater than 1.0. To enforce
  a timestep cap but still allow the timestep to decrease, use
  castro.max_dt. (#1976)

• Gravity was modified to introduce parallel plane gravity with a
  point mass by setting the radius of the star by
  castro.point_mass_location_offset and the integer
  castro.point_mass_offset_is_true == 1. By default, both
  parameters are 0.0 and 0, respectively.

Release 21.09

Castro 21.09