[Trilinos-Users] [Help] FEM code, Suggestions For new user

[Kevin Long]

Hi Reddy,

If you enable Sundance, all of its other Trilinos dependencies will be enabled 
automatically. So basically you would put

-D Trilinos_ENABLE_Sundance:BOOL=ON \

in your cmake command line and all of its dependencies (Epetra, ML, etc) will 
be detected and enabled. To use any interesting meshes you'll want exodus, 
which means getting netcdf as a third-party library and then setting

-D Sundance_ENABLE_Trios:BOOL=ON \

If you're using the 10.6 release, I think you also need to set 

-D Trilinos_ENABLE_EXPLICIT_INSTANTIATION:BOOL=ON \

to get Sundance to build correctly. 

As for Sundance and DOLFIN, they are superficially similar, in that both 
provide a high-level interface for setting up FEM simulations. Sundance is 
pretty tightly integrated with the rest of Trilinos, which is a good thing if 
you only want Trilinos solvers, but not good if you want to use Petsc or 
something. DOLFIN isn't tied to any one solver library. Performance of the 
two is similar; some timing comparisons are in a recent SIAM J. Sci. Comp 
article by Long, Kirby, and van Bloemen Waanders.  In those timings, Sundance 
is a little faster (a factor of two or so) at building matrices, but then in 
any real problem that difference will be dominated by the solve time which 
will be independent of whether you use Sundance or DOLFIN. 

With your Fortran background, you might also talk to Damian Rouson about his 
Morfeus package (not in Trilinos).

Let me know if you have any questions about Sundance.

Regards,

Kevin


-- 
------------------------------------------------------
Kevin Long
Associate Professor
Department of Mathematics and Statistics
Texas Tech University
Lubbock, TX 

"The end of fear is the beginning of wisdom" 
    -- Bertrand Russell
------------------------------------------------------