ParaFEM

The freely available portable library for parallel finite element analysis.

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Friday, May 24, 2013

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Benchmarking ofMaterialsModelling

Engineers at EDF are developing a Materials Modelling Platform that will incorporate a number of open source software programs and provide interfaces for commercial applications.

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Extreme ComputingforPDEs

Extreme engineering approaches that take into account the complex interplay of different physical processes that operate at multiple length and time scales.

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Goldilocks and Dinosaur Tracks

Finite-element analysis used to investigate the extent of bias in the ichnological fossilrecord attributable to body mass.

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The 5th edition of the text book "Programming the Finite Element Method" has been completed. It is now with the Wiley production team and will be available to purchase at the beginning of the 2013/14 academic year. It is aimed at undergraduates, graduate students and practitioners in all areas that use the finite element method.

Smith, Griffiths and Margetts, "Programming the Finite Element Method", Wiley, 2013 can be preordered online.

"Programming the Finite Element Method" is the only engineering text book that introduces the reader to the basic concepts of the finite element method and then takes them on a journey where they learn how to write finite element programs to solve real world problems. Source code and libraries for around 70 example programs are provided. These are introduced step by step, building up the reader's expertise, from 1D and 2D problems that can be run on a desktop computer, to deceptively simple parallel programs that are capable of solving systems with up to a billion equations using tens of thousands of cores. These parallel programs are provided as ParaFEM.

The text book and software provide an excellent foundation for teaching and research. The software can be easily customized by the user for particular applications and interfaced with other third party tools and libraries. If you wish to explore the use of the book and the ParaFEM library (for teaching or research), please contact This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .


Written by Lee Margetts
Sunday 20th January 2013 is a historic date for ParaFEM. During the middle of the night, we managed to solve a problem with more than 1 billion equations, 1,023,468,720 equations to be precise!

The problem was a trivial one, a linear elastic analysis comprising a grid of 440 by 440 by 440 twenty noded hexahedral elements. However, the program did not take advantage of the regular geometry and therefore should be able to solve an arbitrarily shaped domain that is just as large.

We used HECToR to run the analysis. On 4096 MPI processes, the problem solved in less than 15 minutes. Using 8192 MPI processes, run time was 7 minutes. The compute nodes needed to be run in an "under-populated" state in order to access sufficient memory. One core on each of 4096 16-core processors was used for the 4096 process run. Two cores per processor were used in the 8192 process run.

Later in the year, we hope to report results for an arbitrary geometry and visualize the results!  
Written by Lee Margetts

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