libMesh: A C++ Finite Element Library / News: Recent posts

A number of enhancements are currently underway on the SVN branch to enable fully distributed meshes on parallel machines. During this effort a number of small bugs were found and have been fixed in this incremental release. This includes:

(1) improper sizing of the _send_list for
parallel jobs.
(2) PETSc interface fix to allow for
(n_elem < n_cpus).
(3) Correctly return a DistributedVector<> when
neither PETSc nor LASPACK are available.... read more

libMesh version 0.6.1 is now available. This release contains a number of small enhancements and some bugfixes. Some of the new features include:

- PETSc 2.3.3 support
- write VTK-formatted files
- periodic boundary condition support
- input from GMV files
- more robust AdaptiveTimeSolver
- new EigenTimeSolver for FEMSystem analysis

The library has been tested on

o Linux with all recent gcc versions
o Linux with Intel versions 7.1 - 10.0
o Linux with Sun Studio 12
o IBM AIX 5.3 with xlC
o SGI IRIX with MIPSPro 7.4 compilers

*Many* new features -- full list is forthcoming. Please test this on your platform and report any usability issues.

It's now possible to write out/read in solutions on adapted grids in LibMesh. This effectively allows for "checkpointing" of solutions and enhances LibMesh's existing restart capabilities.

By popular demand libMesh now has a wiki. Check out http://libmesh.sourceforge.net/wiki and share your knowledge!

You can now solve 1D problems in LibMesh using substantially similar code as in 2D and 3D problems. There is also support for GNUplot output for 1D problems. Thanks to new developer D. Knezevic for this code.

The latest (hopefully) stable version of libMesh, 0.5.0, has been released. This release includes many new features, so check it out today!

The release candidates are flying fast and furious, and version 0.5.0 should be out soon. This will likely serve as a stable API and code base for some time to come, with bleeding edge changes available from CVS as usual.

The tetrahedral mesh generation library known as TetGen is now distributed with LibMesh. Thanks to the work of Steffen and others, the process of meshing complex 3D geometries can be handled dynamically within LibMesh itself rather than requiring an additional mesh generation step using external software libraries.

Uni-processor (no mpich/no PETSc) support for building shared libraries with g++ under Mac OSX has been added to LibMesh.

Multi-processor (mpich+PETSc) support for building __static__ libraries under Mac OSX has been added as well. At this time, libtool will not create libparmetis.dylib due to some issues with the mpich implementation.

The 2.3.0 version of the PETSc library included many changes to the Vec and Mat interface functions which we use extensively in libmesh. Ben has now completed and checked in support for this new version of PETSc.

This news is a little late, but two of our developers have recently become fathers! Congrats guys and remember it is never to early to start learning C++ ;)

Support for SLEPc, an EigenValue solver which works in conjunction with PETSc, has been added to LibMesh by S. Petersen. A new example (ex16) has also been added which shows how to use the new features.

Initial support for generating two-dimensional Delaunay triangulations of rectangular regions via the Triangle library has been added to LibMesh.

libMesh 0.4.3-rc2 is now available. This release fixes several bugs and improves support for a number of platforms.

This release has been tested on a number of platforms. Please report any usability issues so that they may be addressed in libMesh 0.4.3.