Increasing Flexibility and Reusability of Finite Element Simulations With ViennaX Josef Weinbub

The ever-increasing availability of finite element (FE)-related software tools puts pressure on the soft-ware development of simulation applications. Albeit the fact that feature-rich packages such as the deal.II library are available, solely utilizing a static set of tools for an application limits the capabili-ties of the implementation with respect to flexibility and reusability [1]. For instance, exchanging the linear solver typically requires actual coding and thus implies in-depth knowledge of the code base. A usual way to tackle these challenges are component approaches, such as the Cactus framework [2]. However, the available frameworks either offer an almost prohibitively high entry-level for users or focus on domain-specific applications, like computational fluid dynamics. We introduce our approach, being the plugin execution framework ViennaX [3], which aims for general applicability in scientific computing. Albeit the framework’s genericity, in this work we focus on FE-based applications. En-gineering simulations such as stress simulations are decoupled into reusable ViennaX components, for instance, assembly and linear solver components. These components are connected via the data communication layer to setup a modular simulation. Due to the ViennaX’s run-time system, com-ponents can be exchanged without programming efforts, thus increasing flexibility significantly. Fo