Section: Research Program

Domain specific language - parallel FreeFem++

In the engineering, researchers, and teachers communities, there is a strong demand for simulation frameworks that are simple to install and use, efficient, sustainable, and that solve efficiently and accurately complex problems for which there are no dedicated tools or codes available. In our group we develop FreeFem++ (see http://www.freefem.org/ff++), a user dedicated language for solving PDEs. The goal of FreeFem++ is not to be a substitute for complex numerical codes, but rather to provide an efficient and relatively generic tool for:

• getting a quick answer to a specific problem,

• prototyping the resolution of a new complex problem.

The current users of FreeFem++ are mathematicians, engineers, university professors, and students. In general for these users the installation of public libraries as MPI, MUMPS, Ipopt, Blas, lapack, OpenGL, fftw, scotch, is a very difficult problem. For this reason, the authors of FreeFem++ have created a user friendly language, and over years have enriched its capabilities and provided tools for compiling FreeFem++ such that the users do not need to have special knowledge of computer science. This leads to an important work on porting the software on different emerging architectures.

Today, the main components of parallel FreeFem++ are:

1. definition of a coarse grid,

2. splitting of the coarse grid,

3. mesh generation of all subdomains of the coarse grid, and construction of parallel data structures for vectors and sparse matrices from the mesh of the subdomain,

4. call to a linear solver,

5. analysis of the result.

All these components are parallel, except for point (5) which is not in the focus of our research. However for the moment, the parallel mesh generation algorithm is very simple and not sufficient, for example it addresses only polygonal geometries. Having a better parallel mesh generation algorithm is one of the goals of our project. In addition, in the current version of FreeFem++, the parallelism is not hidden from the user, it is done through direct calls to MPI. Our goal is also to hide all the MPI calls in the specific language part of FreeFem++.