Towards a CCP on Data-centric Computational Mechanics

This is a collaborative computational community centred around the FEniCS and Firedrake finite element systems. FEniCS and Firedrake are world-leading software frameworks for the numerical solution of partial differential equations (PDEs). These numerical simulations are essential for advancing science and engineering across a very broad range of disciplines. FEniCS and Firedrake are used to develop solvers in the geosciences (ocean, atmosphere, cryosphere, geodynamics), nuclear fusion (plasma, tritium transport, breeding blankets), physiology and medicine (brain, heart), and many more besides.

Firedrake and FEniCS

FEniCS and Firedrake are revolutionary packages that make it orders of magnitude less expensive to develop sophisticated PDE solvers. Their unique combination of mathematical software abstractions with code generation techniques enables scientists and engineers to compose advanced discretisations, scalable solvers, and adjoint techniques for systems modelled by any PDE. By generating low-level assembly code from a high-level description, the code can be aggressively optimised for the problem and architecture at hand.

Some of our applications

Scientists and engineers around the world use Firedrake and FEnICS for an enormous range of simulation tasks. Here are just a few of the more prominent:

Weather and climate

Gusto uses Firedrake to prototype the dynamical core of the Met Office’s next-generation numerical weather prediction and climate model.

https://www.firedrakeproject.org/gusto/

Cerebral fluid flow

Waterscales uses FEniCS to model fluid flow and solute transport in the brain, to better understand the need for sleep and the progression of neurodegenerative diseases.

https://www.simula.no/research/projects/waterscales-mathematical-and-computational-foundations-modeling-cerebral-fluid

Mantle convection

G-ADOPT simulates mantle convection. Firedrake’s adjoint enables assimilation of tectonic plate motion to constrain the prior state of the Earth’s interior.

https://gadopt.org

Fusion power

FESTIM uses FEniCS to simulate hydrogen transport and heat transfer processes. UKAEA use it to simulate tritium embrittlement of plasma-facing components for ITER.

https://festim.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

Our Collaborative Computational Community

CCP-DCM is a collaboration between Firedrake and FEniCS developers with STFC and our software users across all fields of science and engineering. Our role is to support and develop the core simulation toolchain to enable current and new users to continue to push the limits of the possible in simulation scale.