deal.II is a free,
open-source library to solve
partial differential equations using the
finite element method.[1][2] The current release is version 9.5, released in July 2023.[3] It is one of the most widely used finite element libraries[citation needed] and provides comprehensive support for all aspects of the solution of partial differential equations. The founding authors of the project — Wolfgang Bangerth, Ralf Hartmann, and Guido Kanschat — won the 2007
J. H. Wilkinson Prize for Numerical Software for deal.II.[4] However, it is a worldwide project with around a dozen "Principal Developers", but over the years several hundred people have contributed substantial pieces of code or documentation to the project.
a large collection of different finite elements of any order: continuous and discontinuous Lagrange elements, Nedelec elements, Raviart-Thomas elements, and combinations,
parallelization using multithreading through
TBB and massively parallel using
MPI. deal.II has been shown to scale to at least 16,000 processors[5] and has been used in applications on up to 300,000 processor cores.
The software started from work at the Numerical Methods Group at
Heidelberg University in Germany in 1998. The first public release was version 3.0.0 in 2000. Since then deal.II has gotten contributions from several hundred authors[8] and has been used in more than 2,000 research publications.[9]
^Janssen, B.; Kanschat, G. (2011). "Adaptive multilevel methods with local smoothing for H1- and Hcurl-conforming high order finite element methods". SIAM J. Sci. Comput. 33 (4).
doi:
10.1137/090778523.
^Kanschat, G. (2004). "Multi-level methods for discontinuous Galerkin FEM on locally refined meshes". Computers & Structures. 82 (28): 2437–2445.
doi:
10.1016/j.compstruc.2004.04.015.