[aspect-devel] Finite element software deal.II version 7.3 released

[Timo Heister]

Version 7.3 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 is primarily a maintenance release. It makes a significant
part of the handling of linear algebra objects across the various
supported libraries (native, via PETSc and via Trilinos) more consistent
in their interfaces. In addition, it also contains a new tutorial
program demonstrating various ways of generating meshes, introduces
better iterators into sparsity patterns and sparse matrices, and has
better ways to deal with multicomponent problems. Release 7.3 is
backward compatible to 7.2. However, it deprecates a number of classes
and functions that will be removed in the next release.

All main features of the previous versions have been continued and improved:
- Extensive documentation and 46 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.