ngsPETSc: a coupling between NETGEN/NGSolve and PETSc

Journal article

Combining advanced meshing techniques with robust solver capabilities is essential for solving difficult problems in computational science and engineering. In recent years, various software packages have been developed to support the integration of meshing tools with finite element solvers. To mention a few, FreeFEM (Hecht et al., 2005) includes built-in support for mesh generation, allowing users to create and manipulate meshes directly within the software. Similarly, deal.II (Arndt et al., 2023) provides a GridGenerator class for generating standard mesh geometries like grids and cylinders. Furthermore, deal.II can interface with OpenCASCADE (OpenCASCADE Technology, 2023) to refine existing grids while conforming to the geometry provided. Other finite element libraries, such as Firedrake (Ham et al., 2023), DUNE-FEM (Dedner et al., 2010), and FEniCSx (Baratta et al., 2023), rely on external tools like Gmsh (Geuzaine & Remacle, 2020) and Tetgen (Si, 2015) for mesh generation. This paper introduces ngsPETSc, software built with petsc4py (Dalcin et al., 2011) that seamlessly integrates the NETGEN mesher (Schöberl, 1997), the NGSolve finite element library (Schöberl, 2014), and the PETSc toolkit (Balay et al., 2023). ngsPETSc enables the use of NETGEN meshes and geometries in solvers that use PETSc’s DMPLEX (Lange et al., 2015), and provides NGSolve users access to the wide array of linear, nonlinear solvers, and time-steppers available in PETSc.

Authors: Betteridge, J; Farrell, P; Hochsteger, M; Lackner. C; Schöberl, J

• Publication status: Published
• Peer review status: Peer reviewed
• Publisher: Open Journals
• Journal: Journal of Open Source Software
• Volume: 9
• Issue: 104
• Article number: 7359
• Publication date: 2024-12-09
• Acceptance date: 2024-12-09
• DOI: 10.21105/joss.07359
• EISSN: 2475-9066
• Language: English