From: wolf
+ While we believe that deal.II is quite usable
+ in the present form, there are still many things that we would
+ implement for future versions. Among these are the following
+ topics:
+
+ Multigrid: Guido Kanschat is working on an
+ implementation of multigrid methods for
+ deal.II. While this is running on globally
+ refined grids, we are still having problems on locally
+ refined grid. We hope to have them sorted out soon.
+
+ Non-conforming elements: While
+ deal.II is quite flexible with respect to
+ the finite element to be used, it was written with Lagrange
+ elements in mind. The basic problems in the implementation of
+ other elements would therefore be the computation of shape
+ function values if the shape functions depend on the shape of
+ the cell. Since this is not the case for the usual continuous
+ elements, the present implementation does not provide all
+ information necessary for the computation of these values.
+
+ In order to implement these elements, it would therefore be
+ necessary to review the interface between the
+
+ Linear solvers:
+ We already have the most common linear solvers, such as CG,
+ BiCGStab, or GMRES. However, there are certainly more
+ proficient implementations of these solvers, but that would
+ need experts in this field which we certainly are not. It
+ would also be of interest to have linear solvers for more
+ specialized applications; in particular, solvers for
+ indefinite symmetric problems, such as MinRes or SymmLQ would
+ be nice.
+
+ Faster linear algebra:
+ The linear algebra implementation in
+ deal.II is quite fast, but only compared
+ to other C/C++ implementations. We know that Fortran
+ compilers can do a much better job in optimizing the tight
+ inner loops of matrix-vector operations. We plan to try
+ interfaces from C to Fortran for that purpose.
+
+ More output formats:
+ It would be nice to have the possibility of writing output in
+ more graphics formats. This is a simple task, since basically
+ only two files have to be modified and the interface is very
+ simple. In case you have an unsupported graphics program and
+ a student with half a week spare time, this is the right
+ project.
+
+ More example programs:
+ There are still many aspects of the library that are not yet
+ covered by the example programs. This is certainly something
+ that should be improved, but is time consuming.
+
+ Parallelization:
+ We do not presently think about parallelizing the libraries
+ on distributed memory machines, but the present
+ implementation of multithreading on shared memory machines is
+ quite promising. We will implement multithreading for several
+ other parts of the library of which we know they are taking
+ significant amounts of time in common applications.
+
+ Documentation:
+ Printing the documentation is probably not what one would
+ usually do anyway, due to the sheer size. However, it might
+ be useful to print, for instance, the example programs. There
+ might be more information worth printing in some cases which
+ I presently can't think about.
+
+ For these cases, it would be interesting to have them in
+ another format than HTML. We think that DocBook SGML would be
+ a good choice, since it can be converted into many other
+ formats, including printable ones and ones which can be
+ nicely displayed on the screen. This would require that some
+ document-generating scripts produce SGML instead (or in
+ addition) to HTML, and some other tweaks, but is probably no
+ big deal.
+ Plans for the future of deal.II
+
+
+
+ FEValues
class and the
+ FiniteElement
class. This would probably also be
+ the right time to further separate the implementation of the
+ mapping from unit to real cell from the actual finite element
+ code.
+
+ We believe in an open development model and would like to + encourage everyone to send us patches and extensions they have. We + think that a cooperative effort can improve the library much more + than a limited and closed circle of developers ever can. We are + therefore eager to review contributions by others for inclusion + into the library and to help in their development. Please feel + free to contact us in such cases! +
+ + +