What’s New in GetFEM 1.7

Released, 2005/01/05:

  • An important number of improvements have been done on GetFEM 1.7. Note that the next release will be GetFEM 2.0, some of its changes won’t maintain backward compatibility with GetFEM 1.7:

    • Introduction of the model brick system, which provides a general framework for the solution of common PDEs. Each brick is dedicated to a specific task (i.e. “handle Dirichlet conditions”, “assembly of the Stokes Problem”, “solve a linear system”, etc.). These bricks are then connected to each other. Examples of use can be found in the “tests/” directory of GetFEM.

    • New models : Small strain plasticity, large strain elasticity, contact and friction conditions, linearized plates, incompressibility in small and large strain elasticity.

    • Simplifications and optimizations in elementary computations.

    • A direct sparse solver (SuperLU 3.0) is available “out of the box”.

    • Ability to export results to VTK and OpenDX.

  • Major changes in Gmm++ 1.7:

    • New preconditioner ILUTP.

    • A BFGS algorithm has been developed.

    • Gmm++ now handles (valid) operations mixing complex and scalars.

    • gmm::real_part(V) and gmm::imag_part(V) gives a possibly writable reference on the real and imaginary part of a complex vector or matrix.

    • The SuperLU interface has been updated for SuperLU 3.0.

getfem-matlab has been renamed “getfem-interface” since it now provides an interface for Matlab and Python (with the Numarray package). Note that, while it is documented and working, the python interface is still considered a work in progress. You have to enable it explicitly with ./configure --enable-python. An interface to the Gmm++ sparse matrices and solvers is also provided.