News on deal.II

This page lists news and announcements on deal.II in reverse chronological order. If you send us extensions to the library, please feel free to also send a patch to this file such that we can announce your contributions in your own words.

Please refer to the archive of the deal.II mailing list for additional news.

Changes in the library since the last release are here.

2009/06/10: Version 6.2.1 released
deal.II version 6.2.0 contained a couple of minor but annoying bugs in its interaction with PETSc. The documentation package also did not include any typeset formulas. Release 6.2.1 corrects these mistakes. A complete list of changes between versions 6.2.0 and 6.2.1 can be found here.
2009/04/27: Version 6.2 released
Version 6.2.0 was released today! A complete list of changes between versions 6.1.0 and 6.2.0 can be found here.
2009/04/14: New tutorial program step-34
step-34, written by Luca Heltai, demonstrates the ability of deal.II to discretize and solve boundary integral equations on curved manifolds.
2008/12/05: Support for meshes embedded in higher dimensions
Based on work by Cataldo Manigrasso and Luca Heltai developed over the last few months on a branch, deal.II now supports meshes that are embedded in higher space dimensions. This allows, for example, to solve equations on the surface of a sphere (e.g. to use boundary element methods for exterior problems).
2008/11/14: New tutorial program step-31
The latest tutorial program, step-31, is contributed by Martin Kronbichler and Wolfgang Bangerth and shows the solution of the Boussinesq approximation to thermally driven convection in an incompressible fluid.
2008/09/10: New tutorial program step-28
step-28, contributed by Yaqi Wang, illustrates the solution of a coupled system of diffusion equations relevant to nuclear reactor physics where we use different meshes for different components of a vector-valued solution.
2008/08/21: deal.II now exceeds of 400,000 lines of code
Since today, deal.II has more than 400,000 lines of code. The rate of growth continues to be close on par with the 3000 lines of code per month that we have had over many years already, with no signs of abating activity!
2008/07/08: Support for anisotropic mesh refinement
Contributed by Tobias Leicht as well as Ralf Hartmann, deal.II now supports anisotropic refinement of meshes. This functionality is explained in the step-30 tutorial program.
2008/05/28: Version 6.1 released
Version 6.1.0 was released today! A complete list of changes between versions 6.0.0 and 6.1.0 can be found here.
2008/05/23: step-33 illustrates the Euler equations
step-33, a tutorial program written mostly by David Neckels, illustrates how the Euler equations of compressible inviscid gas dynamics can be solved. More generally, the program also provides a framework for the solution of arbitrary hyperbolic, nonlinear conservation laws.
2008/03/28: step-22 demonstrates solving the Stokes equations
The new step-22 tutorial program, written by Martin Kronbichler and Wolfgang Bangerth, shows how to solve, and in particular how to solve efficiently, the Stokes equations that describe viscous incompressible fluid flow.
2007/10/31: step-29 tutorial program added
Contributed by Moritz Allmaras, the step-29 tutorial program explains how problems involving complex numbers can be treated in deal.II. In the example, the complex-valued solution to a Helmholtz equation is split into real and imaginary parts and a vector-valued finite element field is used to discretize them seperately. The program also demonstrates how quantities derived from the finite element solution can be directly included in the output by using the new DataPostprocessor class.
2007/09/07: Version 6.0 released
Version 6.0.0 was released today! A complete and long list of changes between versions 5.2.0 and 6.0.0 can be found here.
2007/08/09: step-27 demonstrates hp technology
The new step-27 tutorial program finally demonstrates how to use the hp finite element technology that has been part of deal.II for some 18 months now. It solves a Laplace equation with hp finite elements and shows how to set finite element degrees, assemble matrices on cells with varying polynomial degrees, and how to compute a simple criterion for estimating the local Sobolev smoothness of a function.
2007/07/16: Wilkinson Prize
The principal authors of deal.II—Wolfgang Bangerth, Ralf Hartmann and Guido Kanscht—have received the J. H. Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software for their creation of and work on the deal.II library. The prize committee particularly noted the reliability and usability of the software and the quality of the documentation.

We want to take the opportunity to thank our user community for their support over the years that kept us working on this software. We consider this award motivation to continue this work!

2007/02/09: Support for previously unorientable meshes
Up to now, in 3D only 'orientable' meshes could be used in deal.II, where all lines are in standard orientation and the faces can be either in standard orientation or with a reversed normal. This has been generalized such that now all hexahedral meshes can be used.
2006/10/30: step-21 is finished
Step-21 demonstrates the time dependent flow of a multiphase fluid through a porous medium. It is an extension of step-20, using a mixed formulation and block solvers.
2006/10/03: step-23/24/25 are finished
The step-23, step-24 and step-25 tutorial programs have been added, demonstrating how to solve the time dependent wave equation and a nonlinear variant of it, the sine-Gordon equation.
2006/08/24: deal.II is now part of the SPEC CPU 2006 benchmark
A modified version of the deal.II library and the step-14 tutorial program has been incorporated into the industry standard SPEC CPU 2006 benchmark testsuite that is used to determine the speed of computers. It is part of the floating point testsuite CFP2006 as benchmark 447.dealII.

The inclusion of our software into an industry standard benchmark testsuite will lead to better support of compilers and machines for the kind of program we write, in particular for unstructured hierarchical mesh computations. This will in turn help make our codes run faster on future systems.

2006/2/12: step-20 is finished
The new step-20 tutorial program shows how to use Raviart-Thomas elements to solve a mixed formulation of the Laplace equation. It also demonstrates the use of block matrices and vectors, and how they can be used to define more complex solvers and preconditioners working on the Schur complement.
2006/1/3-5: First User Workshop
After 8 years of existence, it was time to have the first user meeting. During a 3-day workshop held in Heidelberg, topics of software development, use of deal.II for applications, and future directions were discussed by about a dozen developers and users.
2005/12/20: hp functionality merged
After the code had been developed and maintained on a branch for 3 years by Oliver Kayser-Herold and Wolfgang Bangerth, it has now been merged into the main development, and will be available for the next release.
2005/09/17: Version 5.2 released
Version 5.2.0 was released today! A complete and long list of changes between versions 5.1.0 and 5.2.0 can be found here.
2005/09/09: Two more tutorial programs
Two more tutorial programs, step-18 and step-19, are now available. step-18 shows how to solve time-dependent but quasi-static elasticity programs in parallel. step-19 demonstrates some data handling and parameter file techniques.
2005/03/29: deal.II now has a Wiki
Hosted by Luca Heltai, there is now a deal.II Wiki. Users of deal.II are encouraged to visit it, and, as is usual with wikis, edit pages freely and post their experiences and code snippets they want others to know about.
2005/03/07: Function parser library integrated
Luca Heltai has contributed code that integrates a third party function parser library) that takes a string describing a mathematical function, and returns an object that can be used in all places where function objects are used in deal.II.
2004/12/24: Version 5.1 released
Version 5.1.0 was released today! A complete and long list of changes between versions 5.0.0 and 5.1.0 can be found here.
2004/10/21: Qr elements of arbitrary order now support hanging node constraints also in 3d
Lagrange elements previously had hanging node constraint matrices hard coded in 3d, which were only available for r=1,2. Thanks to code written by Oliver Kayser-Herold, this information is now computed on-the-fly, which allows the use of Lagrange elements of arbitrary order also in 3d on meshes with hanging nodes.
2004/05/25: Version 5.0 released
Version 5.0.0 was released today! A complete and long list of changes between versions 4.0.0 and 5.0.0 can be found here.
2004/03/08: Interfaces to PETSc and METIS
In order to support parallel computations, we now have interfaces to both the PETSc library for sequential and parallel linear algebra, as well as to the METIS library for domain partitioning.
2004/03/08: MIPSpro compiler version 7.41 supported
deal.II now also supports compilation on SGIs by the MIPSpro compiler version 7.41.
2003/06/06: Version 4.0 released
After one year, we made it and released Version 4.0.0 today! A complete list of changes between versions 3.4.0 and 4.0.0 can be found here.
2003/04/27: deal.II now exceeds of 200,000 lines of code
Since today, deal.II has now more than 200,000 lines of code. The rate of growth continues to be close to 3000 lines of code per month.
2003/01/24: deal.II runs on AIX 5.1
Using gcc3.2, deal.II can now also be compiled on AIX systems with the PowerPC chip.
2002/12/18: deal.II runs on Mac OS X 10.2
Some changes have been made to allow compiling and running deal.II on Mac OS X 10.2 systems.
2002/12/05: Intel ICC 7.0 compiler supported
deal.II now also supports compilation by the recently released Intel icc 7.0 compiler.
2002/06/28: deal.II 64-bit ready
deal.II also runs on 64-bit systems without changes, as tests on a Sparc machine with Solaris 9 in 64-bit mode have shown. We also have reports of people running deal.II on IA64 systems.
2002/06/06: Version 3.4 released
Today, version 3.4 of the deal.II library has been released. A complete list of changes between versions 3.3.0 and 3.4.0 can be found here.
2002/05/22: Intel ECC Itanium compiler now supported
aclocal.m4 has been changed to detect the Intel ECC compiler for Itanium systems. The ECC compiler can produce optimized code for Intel's new IA-64 architecture.
2002/03/07: New web home www.dealii.org and new email addresses
The deal.II homepage has been moved to www.dealii.org. Also the email addresses have been changed. Though the old web home and the old addresses will be supported for some time we recommend to adjust the bookmarks and mail addresses accordingly.
2002/02/01: Version 3.3 released
Today, version 3.3 of the deal.II library has been released. A complete list of changes between versions 3.2.0 and 3.3.0 can be found here.
2002/01/31: deal.II now consists of 160,000 lines of code
All .cc and .h files of deal.II now sum up to more than 160,000(!) lines of code. deal.II continues to grow with a rate almost constant at 3000 lines of code per month.
2001/09/28: Version 3.2 released
After a long phase of implementation and testing, we today released version 3.2 of the deal.II library. There are many changes between version 3.1 and release 3.2. A complete list of these changes can be found here.
2001/07/06: Compaq's cxx compiler supported
The present development version now also supports compilation by Compaq's cxx compiler. See the ReadMe file for more information on using this compiler.
2001/06/28: deal.II 3.1.2 released
Version 3.1.2 is a bug-fix release based on 3.1. A list of changes between the two versions can be found on this page.
2001/05/23: Intel ICC compiler supported
The present development version of the library is now fixed so that it can also be compiled by Intel's ICC C++ compiler for Linux.
2001/05/17: deal.II 3.1.1 released
Version 3.1.1 is a bug-fix release based on 3.1. A list of changes between the two versions can be found on this page.
2001/02/26: Support for Subroutines from the Harwell Subroutine Library (HSL)
The Harwell Subroutine Library (HSL) is a library that, among much other functionality, offers some sparse direct solvers. We have added support for an interface to these solvers to the library. (See the ReadMe file for more information on installation of HSL subroutines.)
2001/02/20: Version 3.1 released
After a long testing phase, we today released version 3.1 of the deal.II library. There are many changes between version 3.0 and release 3.1. A complete list of these changes can be found here.
2000/08/07: deal.II 3.0.1
Version 3.0.1 is a bug-fix release based on 3.0. A list of changes between the two versions can be found on this page. (Announcement)
2000/04/13: deal.II 3.0 announced
Today, after 2½ years of development and testing, the first public release of the deal.II library was announced (full text).