Release notes v2.0#

There are several major improvements in OpenQuake 2.0.

We have removed the dependency from PostgreSQL and celery and made the engine installable with zero configuration effort on non-cluster platforms. As a consequence, now the engine runs natively on Windows, Mac and Linux. We provide official packages for Ubuntu (12.0, 14.04, 16.04), Red Had (7), a Windows installer (from XP to Windows 10) and a self extracting archive for macOS.
We have improved tremendously the performance of the event based calculators, both hazard and risk. In large calculations the engine can be over an order of magnitude faster and use two orders of magnitudes less memory. Now it is possible to run event based calculations with half million assets.
We have reduced significantly the data transfer in classical PSHA calculations, reduced the memory footprint and speed up the calculator. The net effect is a lot less visible than for the event based, but still positive. Also, now it is possible to set different integration distances for different tectonic region types: this may have a very positive effect on the performance.
We have introduced a command oq with a lot of new functionalities; we deprecated the old command oq-engine, which has been replaced by oq engine.
As usual there were a lot of bug fixes, including a very significant one in the event based risk calculator in presence of a complex logic tree. We removed some deprecated functionality. We improved the serialization of Python objects into HDF5 objects. Internally a lot of refactoring has been done, and the HDF5 structure has changed.
We fixed some issues in the WebUI and made sure it works on Windows. By default each user can see the computations run by the other users, but it is also possible to remove such feature.
There was a lot of work on the exporters and several bugs were fixed. Now virtually all of them export floats in exponential notation with 5 decimal digits. For the first time we have official CSV exports for several output types.
In the event based calculator the user can specificy a minimum intensity for each Intensity Measure Type to ignore any ground motion value below the threshold. The saving of the asset loss table has been optimized, with a measured speedup of three orders of magnitude. Moreover, we optimized the case when the epsilons are not required, i.e. all the covariance coefficients are zero in the vulnerability functions.
It is possible to export some data about the ruptures generated by the event based calculator, including the occurrence rate.
We revisited the weighting of the tasks to have a better task distribution.
Several new views of the datastore were added and the reports improved.
In hazardlib we fixed Z1.0 units bug in Abrahamson, Silva and Kamai (2014) We added modifications to Zhao (2006) inslab GMPE and implemented Atkinson (2008), needed for 2014 US NSHMP.
We backported libhdf5 and h5py from Ubuntu 14.04 to the Ubuntu 12.04 series, thus the engine still works on Ubuntu 12.04 even if this platform is officially deprecated and it has been deprecated for a long time.
A lot more was done and interested people should look at the changelogs: https://github.com/gem/oq-hazardlib/blob/engine-2.0/debian/changelog and https://github.com/gem/oq-engine/blob/engine-2.0/debian/changelog. Over two hundred pull requests were closed in the GEM repositories.