[MODEST] newly born: mesa - Modules for Experiments in Stellar Astrophysics

[Bill Paxton]

Hello,

Piet suggested that I send  this "birth announcement" to the MODEST  
email list to let you know about a new community resource that is  
just coming on-line.

You might know that I've been working on a new stellar evolution code  
to replace EZ.  Along the way I had the good fortune of getting Frank  
Timmes involved since I wanted to make use of some of his wonderful  
code for the microphysics.  As the pieces of the new system started  
to become real, I realized that in this case the parts would probably  
be of even more interest than the whole!  So we are making them  
available as independent libraries.  And some of them are now making  
their first web appearance:

http://theory.kitp.ucsb.edu/~paxton/mesa/mesa_doc/index.html

The name "mesa" stands for modules for experiments in stellar  
astrophysics, and eventually we hope to have a complete set  
sufficient for doing 1D stellar evolution simulations.  The currently  
available modules include both microphysics (nuclear burning,  
opacities, eos) and algorithms (fully implicit IBVP solver, monotone  
interpolation, etc.).  They are all written in a thread-safe style of  
fortran95 in anticipation of the coming revolution in "personal  
parallel computing" based on shared memory multiprocessors.  (The eos  
is not quiet thread-safe yet, but it will be soon.)

Obviously this is an "alpha" release in the sense that things are  
still in need of polishing.  But the underlying algorithms and  
microphysics are all pretty much standard stuff, now put together in  
a manner that will hopefully make them easier to use as building- 
blocks.  As Stephen Justham put it, "the code is coming in kit form  
as well as assembled... more to play with!"

We've checked things on PowerPC and Intel Macs using g95, ifort, xlf,  
and a few other compilers.  Help would be appreciated with a similar  
check on linux boxes with various compilers -- if you are willing,  
the "mesa mebdfi" package would be a good test case (it's the IBVP  
solver module).

Thanks in advance,
Bill