bangerth / idealii

ideal.II an extension to deal.II for tensor-product space-time finit elements

This library provides classes and functions to solve instationary partial differential equations by using space-time finite elements i.e. finite elements in both time and space. It heavily builds on the 1 to 3d finite element capabilities of deal.II so you should make yourself familiar with solving stationary problems with that library first.

How to install ideal.II

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First you need to install deal.II by following the instructions on their site. If you plan on using parallel linear algebra and other advanced features of deal.II and ideal.II you should use either the cmake superbuild or candi. Note down the installation directory of deal.II (for example ~/Software/dealii)

The installation of ideal.II is based on CMake as well, the steps are as follows.

1. Choose an installation directory for ideal.II (for example ~/Software/idealii)

2. Open a console and go to a directory where you want to download the source files (e.g. ~/Downloads) and clone the repository

   cd ~/Downloads

   git clone https://github.com/instatdealii/idealii

3. After cloning is finished execute the following commands (with the above directory examples write ~/Software/dealii instead of <path_to_your_deal_installation> and ~/Software/idealii instead of <path_to_install_idealii_in>

   cd idealii

   cmake -S. -Bbuild -DDEAL_II_DIR=<path_to_your_deal_installation> -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=<path_to_install_idealii_in>

   cmake --build build

   cmake --install build

How to use ideal.II in your codes

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Take a look at one of the example steps and copy the CMakeLists.txt file from there into your project directory. Set the correct project name and sources and then call the following commands from your project directory.

cmake -S. -Bbuild -DIDEAL_II_DIR=<path_to_install_idealii_in>
cmake --build build

Then the executable will be inside the build subdirectory.

How to cite ideal.II

The software metapaper is currently in preparation. Once published the readme will be updated accordingly.

If you write a paper using results obtained with the help of ideal.II, please cite the following reference:

1. Jan Philipp Thiele, ideal.II: a Galerkin space-time extension to the finite element library deal.II, 2023, in preparation

      @article{idealII,
               title = {\texttt{ideal.II}: a Galerkin space-time extension to the finite element library deal.II},
               author = {Jan Philipp Thiele},
               year = {2023,\textit{in preparation}}
      }
   

2. Please also cite deal.II as explained here

Doxygen documentation

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The doxygen documentation of the library functions will soon be hosted centrally. Until then, doxygen documentation can be build with the following steps

1. Open a terminal and navigate to the ideal.II build directory, e.g. ~/Downloads/idealii/build

2. Execute the following command to build the documentation

   make doxygen

3. The documentation start page is located at the <build_dir>/doc/doxygen/html/index.html and can be opened with a webbrowser of your choice e.g.

   firefox ~/Downloads/idealii/build/doc/doxygen/html/index.html