[gmx-users] First beta release of 2019

[Paul bauer]

Hi GROMACS users,

The first beta release of GROMACS 2019 is available!

We are making this available to you to get an early taste of how GROMACS
2019 will look and work, and most importantly to get feedback from you
about how well things work. While we try our hardest to keep the quality of
GROMACS as high as possible, we’re human, we overlook things while doing
other things, and we need your many pairs of eyes to help build a tool that
we can all use to do good science! We really need you to test your kinds of
simulation on your hardware, both for correctness and performance. This is
particularly important if you are using "interesting" hardware or
compilers, because we can't test all of them!

Please do not use this version for doing science you plan to publish - it
needs more testing before it’s reliable enough for that. Similarly, please
don’t use this version as a base for a project that bundles or forks
GROMACS.

What new things can you expect? (See the release notes for more details.)
* Support for update groups to reduce communication overhead
* support for offloading PME long range interactions to single GPU using 
OpenCL
* support for Intel integrated GPUs with OpenCL

There’s lots of other new things, and a few old things removed - please see
the release notes for the complete list. All the content of GROMACS 2018.3
is present, apart from features that have been removed.

If all goes to plan, we hope to ship the final 2019 release in time for the
New Year, but that relies on people joining in and helping us test! We hope
you will consider making that contribution, so that we can continue to
deliver high-quality free simulation software that will be useful to you on
January 1.

You can find the code, manual, release notes, installation instructions and
testsuite at the links below.

Code: ftp://ftp.gromacs.org/pub/gromacs/gromacs-2019-beta1.tar.gz
Documentation: http://manual.gromacs.org/documentation/2019-beta1/index.html
(includes install guide, user guide, reference manual)
Release Notes:
http://manual.gromacs.org/documentation/release-notes/index.html
Test Suite:
http://gerrit.gromacs.org/download/regressiontests-2019-beta1.tar.gz

Happy testing!

Paul Bauer
GROMACS release manager