General Introduction Cactus is an open source problem solving environment designed for scientists and engineers. Its modular structure easily enables parallel computation across different architectures and collaborative code development between different groups. Cactus originated in the academic research community, where it was developed and used over many years by a large international collaboration of physicists and computational scientists. Thorns can implement custom developed scientific or engineering applications, such as computational fluid dynamics.
Cactus runs on many architectures.
Applications, developed on standard workstations or laptops, can be seamlessly run on clusters or supercomputers. Read general descriptions of Cactus in the NCSA datalink newsletter or in IEEE Computing . If you want to use Cactus take a look at our Users Guide , or for the impatient, try the Quick Start guide . If your only goal is to implement a simulation of a 1D wave equation, you probably don't want to use Cactus. This is just a small rundown of the features that Cactus offers.