Even better, one of the guys involved with the code has a fantastic Youtube series on the Finite Element Method [1]
I used it in grad school, he's a great explainer, and he's addressing the talk to an audience of computer science students. It's long, of course, but it's spot on.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K2mkx7va5LQ&list=PLh_UinHuMh...
If anyone should be interested, I have since 2013 been working on building an integrated and unified simulation platform and GUI for FEA and multiphysics simulation codes, such as FEniCS, OpenFOAM, and SU2. The rather neat idea is to make it easy for users to learn one (easy) platform while allowing them to use essentially any simulation code underneath [1].
You might also want to look at the Firedrake project [1]
Re:Finite Element Method
by InfinityByTen on Tuesday February 18, 2020 @08:52AM
(#22356029)
Oh ther're tons of those. Here's another: https://freefem.org/
Eventually all of them call LAPACK AND BLAS Fortran stuff written decades ago. Just the problem definition syntax evolves a little in each package.
Re:Finite Element Method
by Random_ernest on Tuesday February 18, 2020 @09:23AM
(#22356237)
I used it extensively in my PhD thesis for solving nonlinear eigenvalue problems that arise from Maxwell's equations. It's a great tool, in fact one of the best tools for scientific computing I ever used.
We also used it extensively for teaching, since you can implement a lot of cool things without having to worry to deeply about programming or CS.
"FEniCS is a popular open-source (LGPLv3) computing platform for solving partial differential equations (PDEs). FEniCS enables users to quickly translate scientific models into efficient finite element code. With the high-level Python and C++ interfaces to FEniCS, it is easy to get started, but FEniCS offers also powerful capabilities for more experienced programmers. FEniCS runs on a multitude of platforms ranging from laptops to high-performance clusters."
I never got to use it because I've moved out of mechanical simulations a few years ago, but it definitely looks pretty sweet ;)
[1] https://fenicsproject.org/