Collaborative Research: Frameworks: Software: Future Proofing the Finite Element Library Deal.II -- Development and Community Building

Clemson University, Clemson SC

Investigators

Abstract

Partial differential equations (PDEs) are used as mathematical models throughout the natural sciences, engineering, and more recently also in the biomedical and social sciences as well as in finance. Their numerical solution is, consequently, of great relevance in understanding, accurately simulating, and optimizing natural, human, and engineered systems. In many applications, finite element methods (FEM) are the method of choice converting the PDE into finite dimensional, computationally solvable problems. The deal.II project is an open source FEM software library that enables scientists to solve PDEs across many disciplines, that supports simulation and computational discovery in virtually all parts of the sciences and engineering by providing tools to solve essentially all PDEs amenable to the FEM. In this project new capabilities will be added and the user and contributor community expanded to include additional science domains. Deal.II is a project with a thriving, world-wide user and developer community. This project will further enable its community of users and developers, by undertaking specifically for work that can either not be expected of volunteers, or that is necessary to strengthen the long-term independent sustainability of the project. Based on a recent user survey, the following work items in the following four categories will be addressed: 1. Foundational features too large or complicated to be tackled by volunteers: the team will research and implement efficient and scalable approaches to support parallel, adaptive multigrid and hp FEM. 2. Expand documentation and training modules through more tutorial programs and YouTube-hosted video lectures: This will further broaden the reach of the project and extend the education for the computational science community. 3. Continuous integration and packaging infrastructure to better support the pace of development. 4. Support and expand deal.II's thriving communities through a summer school, workshops, hackathons, and careful mentoring of newcomers. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.