How can you facilitate deal.ii assimilation and increase usage ?

[C B]

First of, deal.ii seems to be an amazing software package, with amazing capabilities, I am just trying to figure out how to harness the power of deal.ii, kudos to all the people who developed deal.ii !!!

 I am a new user of deal.ii, and I have browsed, built and run several of the latest tutorials and I have browsed the code-gallery section. I have many years of experience working with FE codes, although not with the (high-level) C++ templates that deal.ii is built on, which is the case of a large number of engineering students and professionals.

Although there are lots of Tutorials, because deal.ii can tackle such as wide spectrum of PDEs, each tutorial seems overwhelming and does not directly address the immediate or specific need of a new user.

For example, let's say a new user is interested in solving basic linear elasticity cases on simple domains (2/3d), with different boundary conditions, exporting displacements and stresses, and with different linear equation solvers to see what is the performance of the software when increasing the model size.

This is perhaps one of the most basic uses of FEA that a large number of people need. However, I could not find a repository with a (large) number of documented test cases on this topic. This would fit the philosophy of "learn by example", as opposed to learn most of the theory/documentation and figure out how to solve your specific case.

Please, let me know if such a repository exists, and if it doesn't, wouldn't such a repository help lots of new users who need to get up to speed very quickly, and who do not have the time or the knowledge to go over lots of tutorials dealing with topics that do not help them to address their immediate needs?

Your expertise and help will be greatly appreciated!

[Wolfgang Bangerth]

On 5/28/25 22:01, C B wrote:
>
> Although there are lots of Tutorials, because deal.ii can tackle such as wide
> spectrum of PDEs, each tutorial seems overwhelming and does not directly
> address the immediate or specific need of a new user.
> For example, let's say a new user is interested in solving basic linear
> elasticity cases on simple domains (2/3d), with different boundary conditions,
> exporting displacements and stresses, and with different linear equation
> solvers to see what is the performance of the software when increasing the
> model size.
> This is perhaps one of the most basic uses of FEA that a large number of
> people need. However, I could not find a repository with a (large) number of
> documented test cases on this topic. This would fit the philosophy of "learn
> by example", as opposed to learn most of the theory/documentation and figure
> out how to solve your specific case.

Yes, these are all good points. We do provide quite a lot of documentation,
but it would of course be nice to have even more. In practice, there are many
deal.II-based codes that people have developed and that you can probably find
on github. I imagine that there are tools that help you search the millions of
repositories on github for specific criteria (though I don't know what these
tools are). Given the many many uses people have found for deal.II, there's
almost certainly something out there that does what you need.

> Please, let me know if such a repository exists, and if it doesn't, wouldn't
> such a repository help lots of new users who need to get up to speed very
> quickly, and who do not have the time or the knowledge to go over lots of
> tutorials dealing with topics that do not help them to address their immediate
> needs?

We do have the code gallery that is intended to fit your purpose:
https://dealii.org/gallery_applications/code_gallery/
We always hope that people contribute more codes to it.

Of course, in practice there is always the tradeoff between providing
well-structured and thought-out documentation, and providing so much that it
becomes hard to search for things. It's hard enough these days to find which
of the ~90 tutorials is right for you. Imagine if the code gallery had 500 codes.

That all said, we'd love for people to propose ideas for how to structure
documentation better, and perhaps to help make that happen!

Best
W.



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Wolfgang Bangerth email: bang...@colostate.edu
www: http://www.math.colostate.edu/~bangerth/