HierBEM: A 3D Galerkin BEM library based on deal.II

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Jihuan Tian

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Dec 8, 2025, 9:05:22 AM (10 days ago) Dec 8
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Hello everyone!

My name is Jihuan Tian, an independent researcher in Shanghai, China.

I’ve developed HierBEM, a 3D Galerkin boundary element method (BEM) library written in C++. Built on deal.II, HierBEM uses hierarchical matrices for near log-linear complexity. The numerical quadrature is accelerated by CUDA. I hope HierBEM can be a nice supplement to deal.II with its capability of handling open domains and directly solving physical fields on surfaces with a higher accuracy than FEM.

For more information about HierBEM, please visit the following links:

Abbas Ballout

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Dec 12, 2025, 4:23:17 AM (6 days ago) Dec 12
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Seems cool. 
Couldn't build Hier because I don't have Cuda configured yet. 
This cmake *might* be useful for you if you are configuring with julia: 
https://github.com/JuliaInterop/libcxxwrap-julia/blob/main/FindJulia.cmake

Abbas

Jihuan Tian

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Dec 13, 2025, 2:52:31 AM (5 days ago) Dec 13
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Hello Abbas,

Thank you for providing me with the file FindJulia.cmake!

The reason for why CUDA is mandatory in HierBEM is that the numerical quadrature (Sauter quadrature) for double integrals (with singularities) in Galerkin BEM is much more computation intensive than the usually adopted Gauss quadrature for single integrals in FEM.

Take discretization of the hypersingular boundary integral operator as an example. For a double integral on a pair of same quadrangles, the order of the Sauter quadrature should be at least 5. Meanwhile, the 4D integration domain is split into 8 parts. Then the total number of quadrature points is 5^4*8=5000. In comparison, for integration on a hexahedra in FEM, Gauss quadrature of order 3 is usually enough and the total number of quadrature points is only 64. Moreover, the integrand function in Galerkin BEM is more complicated than that in FEM.

Therefore, HierBEM uses hardware acceleration to make the performance of Galerkin BEM tolerable for engineering cases.

Jihuan

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Wolfgang Bangerth

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Dec 15, 2025, 6:09:33 PM (2 days ago) Dec 15
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Hi Jihuan:
this is pretty amazing!

> I’ve developed HierBEM, a 3D Galerkin boundary element method (BEM)
> library written in C++. Built on deal.II, HierBEM uses hierarchical
> matrices for near log-linear complexity. The numerical quadrature is
> accelerated by CUDA. I hope HierBEM can be a nice supplement to deal.II
> with its capability of handling open domains and directly solving
> physical fields on surfaces with a higher accuracy than FEM.

First, would you like us to visit HierBEM here?
https://dealii.org/gallery_applications/applications/

Second, are there parts of HierBEM that you think might be of broader
interest and that you would like to contribute to deal.II itself?
Looking at your list of features, I wonder whether for example these
things might be of sufficient interest to others:
* your complex-valued CG/GMRES
* various H-matrix algebra pieces you list under your "Features"
* (some of) the things you currently have in LAPACKFullMatrixExt
* the TableBase::data() function
* many of your tool functions
* classes such as ClusterTree
If some of this became part of deal.II you would also not have to
support that code yourself any more.

In general, looking through your code, it is really nice to see how well
you document everything!

Best
Wolfgang
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