[aspect-devel] deal.II version 9.0 released

[Wolfgang Bangerth]

[Sending this on behalf of the deal.II team. We will require this version of 
deal.II for the next release of ASPECT, but it is not necessary for the 2.0 
release that was put out last week.]

Version 9.0.0 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:

- deal.II now requires C++11.

- Support for curved geometries has been improved. Manifold descriptions
   are now exclusively handled via manifold_ids and all compatibility code
   that used boundary indicators has been removed. In addition, every
   function in the GridGenerator namespace now attaches a default manifold
   to the curved parts of the domain described by the generated mesh.

- deal.II now has a dedicated particles module. The module provides a base
   class Particle that represents a particle with position, an ID number and
   a variable number of properties. They are jointly represented by a
   ParticleHandler class that manages the storage and handling of all
   particles.

- deal.II gained dedicated, first-class support for automatic
   differentiation libraries and various capabilities (taped and tapeless
   ADOL-C, Sacado with dynamic forward, reverse, nested dynamic forward, and
   nested reverse support for first and second derivatives).

- Interfaces to a number of additional external libraries has been added.
   deal.II can now be configured with optional support for Assimp,  Gmsh,
   nanoflann, ROL, ScaLAPACK and Sundials.

- This release adds support for computations on GPUs, both, for matrix-based
   and for matrix-free applications. For matrix-based applications, cuSPARSE
   and cuSOLVER are used. Support for matrix-free computation on GPUs is
   preliminary. For now, the evaluation of the operator is limited to meshes
   without hanging-nodes.

- The matrix-free infrastructure in deal.II was significantly overhauled for
   the current release. The major new contribution is the support of face
   integrals through a new class FEFaceEvaluation.

- deal.II has made extensive use of both the Clang-Tidy and Coverity Scan
   static analysis tools for detecting bugs and other issues in the code.
   For example, around 260 issues were detected and fixed using the latter
   tool.

- LinearOperator, a flexible template class that implements the action of a
   linear operator, now supports computations with Trilinos, Schur
   complements, and linear constraints. This class is, as of this release,
   the official replacement for about half a dozen similar (but less
   general) classes, such as FilteredMatrix, IterativeInverse, and
   PointerMatrix.

- A number of non-standard, special-purpose quadrature rules have been
   implemented. Among these are ones for truncating standard formulas to
   simplical domains (QSimplex), singular transformations of the unit cell
   to the unit simplex (QDuffy), composition of simplical quadrature rules
   to a combined rule on the unit cell (QSplit), and transformation of the
   unit square to polar coordinates (QTrianglePolar).

- Support for complex-valued vectors at the same level as real-valued
   vectors.

- A new python tutorial program tutorial-1; as well as updates to step-37.
   In addition, the separate code gallery of deal.II has gained a number of
   new entries.

- Improved support for user-defined run-time parameters: a new
   ParameterAcceptor class has been added to the library. The class is
   intended to be used as a base for any class that wants to handle
   parameters using the ParameterHandler class.

- New caching mechanism for expensive grid computations: we introduced a
   new class GridTools::Cache that caches computationally intensive
   information about a Triangulation. This class allows the user to query
   some of the data structures constructed using functions in the GridTools
   namespace.

- More than 330 other features and bugfixes.

For more information see
- the preprint at https://www.dealii.org/deal90-preprint.pdf
- the list of changes at
 
https://www.dealii.org/developer/doxygen/deal.II/changes_between_8_5_0_and_9_0_0.html

The main features of deal.II are:
- Extensive documentation and 57 fully-functional 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 100,000+ processor cores
- Interfaces to Trilinos, PETSc, METIS, UMFPACK and other external software
- Output for a wide variety of visualization platforms.


Matthias, on behalf of the deal.II developer team and many contributors.


-- 
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Wolfgang Bangerth          email:                 bangerth at colostate.edu
                            www: http://www.math.colostate.edu/~bangerth/