Elmer FEM

open source multiphysical simulation software

General 

Elmer version 9.0

admin

We are happy to announce a new Elmer major release 9.0.

The source code of the release is available in “release” branch of GitHub at https://github.com/ElmerCSC/elmerfem. You may retrieve the release at any later date using its tag by “git checkout release-9.0”. Note that the release is just a stable snapshot of the devel branch. If you follow the devel branch you’re always up-to-date with most latest developments.

The main reason for adopting new major release number is the great progress of ElmerGUI done by Saeki in the true spirit of open source development. Than you Saeki! ElmerGUI has received a facelift and the internal VTK widget for visualization now uses VTU format instead of the lagacy ElmerPost format. So with version 9.0 onwards there is no reason to use the ElmerPost format anymore.

Some other highlights included in the release are:

  • New vectorized and threaded Navier-Stokes solver with block preconditioning
  • Beam element module to complete structural models
  • Mixed element Poisson solver (with Hdiv basis)
  • Large number of improvements for electromagnetics
  • Coupled structural problems enables (e.g. shell-solid)
  • Enable automatic elimination of conforming BCs
  • Faster and improved view factor computation
  • Better support for parametrized runs with Run Control and inline parameters
  • …

There have been about 1340 code commits (excluding merge commits) since the last official version 8.4 published in Dec 2018. The release notes cover most important new features that are visible for the end-user, but also some new functionality of the code that can be of use for developers. Beyond that there have been numerous smaller improvements and fixes to the code that have not been covered in the notes.

The most prominent application area of Elmer is computational glaciology. This time there are separate release notes for that branch too. Some of the developments there have been directly made to Elmer library and are therefore generally applicable.

The complete release notes may be obtained directly from GitHub:
https://github.com/ElmerCSC/elmerfem/bl … ase_9.0.md
https://github.com/ElmerCSC/elmerfem/bl … ice_9.0.md

The updated binaries will be available through nightly builds via launchpad on some Linux platforms:
https://launchpad.net/~elmer-csc-ubuntu … er-csc-ppa

and on nic and sf for Windows:
http://www.nic.funet.fi/pub/sci/physics … n/windows/
https://sourceforge.net/projects/elmerfem/

Elmer documentation has also been modified to better follow the features of version 9.0. This includes documentation of many new solver modules. Unfortunately the documentation is never quite complete and is still lacking behind in some developments. Fresh documentation is available at:
http://www.nic.funet.fi/pub/sci/physics/elmer/doc/

Apart from the core Elmer team at CSC (Juhani K., Mika M., Juha R., Peter R., Thomas Z.) git log shows contributions from Daniel B., Denis C., Eef v. D., Eelis T., Fabien G-C, Foad S. F., Fredrik R., Olivier G., Joe T., Luz P., Mondher C., Rupert G., Sami I., Sami R., Samuel C., and Saeki T. to this release. Additionally there are many ongoing developments in several branches that have not been merged to this release, and are therefore not covered here. Also sometimes the code has been passed on by the original author by means other than the git, and in such cases the names may have been accidentally omitted.

The contribution of all developers is gratefully acknowledged!

Best regards,
ElmerTeam
CSC – IT Center for Science, Finland
http://www.csc.fi/elmer
http://www.elmerfem.org/