[aspect-devel] Finite element software deal.II version 7.2 released

[Timo Heister]

Version 7.2 of deal.II, the object-oriented finite element library 
awarded the
J. H. Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software, has been released. It is
available for free under an Open Source license from the deal.II homepage at

http://www.dealii.org/

This version has a large number of enhancements:
- A framework for matrix-free finite element computations, with support
   for both intra-node parallelism and massively parallel inter-node
   computations, together with two tutorial programs that show how this 
can be
   used (step-37, step-48)
- A tutorial program demonstrating advanced techniques for
   multiphase flow (step-43)
- Three tutorial programs showing how to solve variational inequalities (the
   obstacle problem, step-41), finite strain elasticity (step-44), and a
   rewritten introduction to nonlinear problems (step-15)
- Support for problems with codimension 2, for example for solving 
problems on
   a line embedded into R^3
- Distributed triangulations now provide checkpoint/restart functionality
- Support for parallel output using HDF5/xdmf
- More than 100 other changes and bug fixes throughout the library.

All main features of the previous versions have been continued and improved:
- Extensive documentation and 45 working example programs
- Support for dimension-independent programming
- Locally refined adaptive meshes
- Multigrid support
- A zoo of different finite elements
- Fast linear algebra
- Built-in support for shared memory and distributed parallel computing,
   scaling from laptops to clusters with 10,000s of processor cores
- Interfaces to Trilinos, PETSc, METIS, UMFPACK and other external software
- Output for a wide variety of visualization platforms.

Wolfgang Bangerth, Timo Heister, Guido Kanschat, and many other 
contributors.