LifeV 0.5 Release Announcement

DATELINE November 30, 2004

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

The LifeV team is very pleased to announce the newly released LifeV-0.5 after almost two months of extremely active development.

LifeV underwent major changes during the last weeks. The biggest internal change is that now LifeV requires and uses heavily the excellent and extremely high quality C++ Boost library from http://www.boost.org.

LifeV includes all its libraries and tests for free under the Free Software LGPL and GPL licenses. LifeV can be obtained in source from http://cmcsforge.epfl.ch.

Refactoring and Bug Fixing

LifeV has been refactored, robustified and cleaned up in various places and a lot of bug fixing was done. Note, however, that there are still many places in LifeV where the programmer must be very careful. Hopefully with the coming versions of LifeV we will get rid of these dark corners.

The refactoring and bug fixing are invaluable work for the LifeV project in order to achieve its objectives.

This has been brought to you by the joint work of Christoph Winkelmann, Christophe Prud'homme, Gilles Fourestey, Mauro Meneghin.

Features

Here is a non exhaustive list of noteworthy new features:

• First version of a fluid structure(FS) framework

  LifeV provides a framework for fluid structure interaction, it is still very much in infancy, but it can already be useful, powerful and easy to use:

  • Implementation of the FS operator steklovPoincaré that uses domain decomposition ideas to decouple the fluid and solid solvers.(Gilles Fourestey, Simone Deparis)
  • FS operators framework : exactJacobian, fixedPoint, steklovPoincaré (Gilles Fourestey, Christophe Prud'homme)
  • FS solver that provides a similar interface to the other standard solvers in LifeV(Christophe Prud'homme)
  • inclusion in the automatic nightly testing framework(Christophe Prud'homme, Gilles Fourestey)

  We would like also to acknowledge the very helpful discussions with Miguel Fernandez.

• Darcy solver

  The Darcy Solver by Jean-Frédéric Gerbeau and Vincent Martin got a big revamp.

  • permeability and boundary conditions are no longer hard coded in the solver
  • hexahedra and tetrahedra element shapes
  • inverse of the permeability is provided by the user
  • various tests and examples are provided

  This has been brought to you by the joint work of : Christophe Prud'homme and Vincent Martin

• Algorithm to impose one flux or two fluxes

  The work of Christian Vergara on flux imposition for Navier-Stokes has been implemented in LifeV with the following features:

  • impose flux at up to two boundary interfaces
  • replace seamlessly standard Navier-Stokes solver
  • several strategies are available to speedup computations at the expense of accuracy

  This has been brought to you by the joint work of : Christian Vergara and Christophe Prud'homme

• Discontinuous Galerkin (dG)

  Daniele Di Pietro committed an implementation of discontinuous Galerkin along with a testcase.

• Linear algebra

  LifeV linear algebra data structures were changed heavily. In particular, LifeV now uses the boost::numeric::ublas library.

  This has been brought to you by Christophe Prud'homme.

• Linear algebra solvers

  LifeV provides easy to use interfaces to some standard and high quality linear algebra libraries:

  • interface to AZTEC (Christoph Winkelmann)
  • interface to PETSC (Christoph Winkelmann and Christophe Prud'homme)
  • interface to UMFPACK (Christophe Prud'homme)

• New interfaces to open-source mesh generators

  LifeV used to rely too much on proprietary or commercial mesh generators. This has been fixed with the addition of two excellent open-source mesh generators.

  • Netgen support (Mauro Meneghin)
  • Gmsh support (Christophe Prud'homme)

Work In Progress

There are many work in progress in LifeV. Here are a few noteworthy projects:

• Simulation of electrical activity of the heart

  Jean Frédéric Gerbeau has created a test for the implementation and testing of a Fitzhugh-Nagumo solver.

• Multiscale Modelling

  There is an effort to have a multiscale framework in LifeV. In particular with the joint work of Alexandra Moura, Christian Vergara, Christophe Prud'homme and Vincent Martin. Alexandra has already some simple prototype for 0D3D coupling with both compliant and non-compliant structures.

• Mass Transport Modelling

  Martin Prosi continues his effort regarding mass transport modelling.

• IP Stabilization

  Christoph Winkelmann, with the initial work from Miguel Fernandez, is working on a new Navier-Stokes Solver implementation and the possibility to use IP stabilization work (for both convection dominant flows and approximation stabilization)

• 1,2,3 LifeV

  Christophe Prud'homme is making changes to allow 1D, 2D and 3D simulation seamlessly in LifeV. Right now LifeV can do only 3D simulations.

Requirements and Other Libraries and Utilities

LifeV requires Blas, Lapack, Aztec and the Boost libraries to compile.

Otherwise it might be useful to have the following tools or libraries installed:

• MPI (MPICH/LAM)
• petsc
• umfpack
• metis/parmetis
• ensight
• netgen
• gmsh
• medit
• gmv

Note to CMCS: all these tools and libraries have been made available to you thanks to the joint work of Christoph Winkelmann, Christophe Prud'homme and Klaus Sapelza