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Elmer version 8.3 is published

Posted: 23 May 2017, 09:42
by raback
Dear present and future users of Elmer,

We are happy to announce a new Elmer minor release 8.3.

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-8.3". There is also a fresh Windows installer for version 8.3 available at

https://sourceforge.net/projects/elmerfem/.

The release notes list the most important new features of Elmer since the last official version 8.2 published on 12 March 2016. There has been over 500 code commits after that time.

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 has been numerous smaller improvements and fixes to the code that have not been covered in the notes.

The most active developments since the last version have been in electromagnetics. The developments have been carried within SEMTEC project partially funded by the Tekes. The goal of the project was to develop capabilities for the solution of electrical machines and other electromechanical devices. With the end of the project many of the models developed have become public which is also reflected in the release notes.

The most important altruistic application area of Elmer continues to be computational glaciology (Elmer/Ice). Whereas the development in the field is very active but the version 8.3. does not include the most recent developments in the "elmerice" related branches. For the Elmer/Ice community the information of relevant developments is given within that community so the release notes are sparse on those details.

This release also includes a first version of a novel shell solver, see the section "Shell Equations of Linear Elasticity" in Elmer Models Manual. This finite element formulation depends on strain reduction operators which have currently been worked out only for the lowest-order elements (a 3-node triangle or 4-node quadrilateral).

In recent years the code has undergone through significant modernization process of both code and practices. These have involved transformation from gnu autotools and svn to cmake and git. Also multithreading and vectorization of the code has been under work. Already this version provides new more efficient means for basis vector computation and assembly that have been utilized in some test solvers. This work has been done within the Intel Parallel Computing Center project (IPCC). This work will continue.

Elmer documentation has also been modified to better follow the features of version 8.3. This includes documentation of many new solver modules. Unfortunately the documentation is never quite complete and is still lacking behind in some developments.

We would like to thank the developers outside the core team at CSC for many important contributions. The contributors for this release have been at least from Martin van Gijzen, Mikko Byckling, Eelis Takala, Pavel Ponomarev, Erik Edelmann, Joe Todd, Cheng Gong, Laure Tavard, Erik Edelmann, Rupert Gladstone, Juris Vencels. This listing is not complete since there are developments in various application areas that are not covered by the release notes, and code that has been passed on means other than git. Also there has been tens of users and collaborators feeding us with ideas, performing crucial testing, and sending bug reports and other feedback. Without these efforts development of Elmer could not have been as fast and productive.

The release notes are attached here for convenience.

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