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PETSc and SLEPc

FreeFEM is interfaced with PETSc and SLEPc which offer a wide range of sequential or parallel linear or nonlinear solvers, time steppers, optimizers, and eigensolvers. In particular, it gives access transparently (without much changes to user code) to: distributed and multithreaded direct solvers (PARDISO, MUMPS, SuperLU), multigrid solvers (hypre, GAMG), domain decomposition methods (block Jacobi, ASM, HPDDM). For a detailed introduction to these tools, interested readers are referred to the tutorial Introduction to FreeFEM with an emphasis on parallel computing.

In most of the scripts listed below, the following standard procedure is used.
  • Load an initial sequential mesh (in 2D or 3D).

  • Partition the mesh and generate connectivity information according to the number of processes.

  • Provide these information to PETSc so that subsequent computations may be done in a distributed fashion.

Combining the power and flexibility of PETSc with the ease-of-use of FreeFEM may help design multiphysics solvers, e.g., for Navier–Stokes equations, advanced matrix-free discretizations, and such.

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