[aspect-devel] Finite Element Software deal.II Version 8.4.0 released

[Timo Heister]

Version 8.4.0 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

                   https://www.dealii.org/

The major changes of this release are:
- Parallel triangulations can now be partitioned in ways that allow weighting
  cells differently.
- Improved support for complex numbers throughout the library.
- A new triangulation type that supports parallel computations but ensures
  that the entire mesh is available on every processor.
- An implementation of the Rannacher-Turek element, as well as an element that
  extends the usual Q(p) elements by bubble functions.
- Second and third derivatives of finite element fields are now computed
  exactly.
- The interface between finite elements, quadrature, mapping, and the FEValues
  class has been rewritten. It is now much better documented.
- Initial support for compiling with Visual C++ 2013 and 2015 under Windows
  has been added.
- Where possible, the 'gold' linker is used, dramatically speeding up linking
- More than 140 other features and bugfixes.

For more information see
- the preprint at https://www.dealii.org/deal84-preprint.pdf
- the list of changes at
  https://www.dealii.org/8.4.0/doxygen/deal.II/changes_between_8_3_and_8_4.html

The main features of deal.II are:
- Extensive documentation and 52 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, Matthias Maier,
and many other contributors.

-- 
Timo Heister
http://www.math.clemson.edu/~heister/