Breaking changes in backward compatibility

To keep up-to-date with changes in compute-centers and geoscientists’ needs, breaking changes sometimes needed to be introduced in SeisSol.

All breaking changes for version 0.9.0 and later are listed here.

Energy Output

(since 0.9.0, #531, April 2022)

Since we merged GitHub pull request #531 (April 2022), the seismic moment time history output, from which the moment rate can be post-processed, is integrated into the energy output (see Energy output). Therefore, the parameters magnitude_output_on, energy_rate_output_on and energy_rate_printtimeinterval have been removed from the DynamicRupture namelist in the main parameter file.

C++ dynamic rupture implementation

(1.0.0 to 1.3.2, since #625, September 2022)

While porting dynamic rupture to C++, we changed a few parameter names to make things more consistent. The new dynamic rupture implementation has been merged in September 2022 (GitHub pull request #625). The linear slip weakening friction laws FL=2 (nucleation by stress increase) and FL=16 (forced time rupture nucleation) have been merged (the new friction law is FL=16; but FL=2 will be accepted as input after #1288). Because of this change, FL=16 now requires nucleation stress or tractions to be specified in the fault-specific yaml file.

Parameter file (parameters.par):

old	new
0d0	0.0 (only until #1173)
v_star	pc_vStar (only until #1288)
L	pc_prakashLength (only until #1288)
mu_w	rs_muW (only until #1288)
alpha_th	tp_thermalDiffusivity (only until #1288)
rho_c	tp_heatCapacity (only until #1288)
tp_lambda	tp_undrainedTPResponse (only until #1288)
initemp	tp_iniTemp (only until #1288)
inipressure	tp_iniPressure (only until #1288)

Fault-specific yaml file (fault.yaml):

old	new
RS_sl0	rs_sl0 (only until #1427)
alpha_hy	tp_hydraulicDiffusivity (only until #1427)
TP_half_width_shear_zone	tp_halfWidthShearZone (only until #1427)
Ts0	T_s (only until #1427)
Td0	T_d (only until #1427)
Pn0	T_n (only until #1427)
RS_f0	rs_f0 (only until #1540)
RS_b	rs_b (only until #1540)
RS_muw	rs_muw (only until #1540)

FORTRAN Removal

(since 1.1.0, #829, April 2023)

All FORTRAN had been removed; and several parameters have been deprecated. However, all previous configuration files continue working.

Relative Paths

(since 1.2.0, #1156, August 2024)

SeisSol now looks for all paths in the parameter file first relatively to the parameter file, and only then relative to the execution directory. This rule does not apply for the output directory.

Before this change, also all other paths were only viewed relative to the execution directory.

For absolute paths, nothing has changed.

DR Traction Computation

(since 1.1.0, #895, September 2023)

There was an adjustment in the Rate-and-State friction law computation; thus the results differ slightly between 1.0.1, and 1.1.0 onwards for the CPU computation. The adjustment was propagated to the GPU implementation after 1.3.0.

The respective commit updated the CPU implementation; the GPU implementation was updated by #1288.