The LifeV library: engineering mathematics beyond the proof of concept

TL;DR

LifeV is a versatile C++ library for finite element solutions of PDEs, designed for real-world engineering problems on diverse parallel architectures, including cloud and HPC systems.

Contribution

It introduces a practical, parallel-capable finite element library that extends academic research tools to real-world engineering applications.

Findings

Used in computational hemodynamics and cardiac mechanics

Supports diverse parallel architectures including cloud and HPC

Built on domain decomposition methods with external libraries

Abstract

LifeV is a library for the finite element (FE) solution of partial differential equations in one, two, and three dimensions. It is written in C++ and designed to run on diverse parallel architectures, including cloud and high performance computing facilities. In spite of its academic research nature, meaning a library for the development and testing of new methods, one distinguishing feature of LifeV is its use on real world problems and it is intended to provide a tool for many engineering applications. It has been actually used in computational hemodynamics, including cardiac mechanics and fluid-structure interaction problems, in porous media, ice sheets dynamics for both forward and inverse problems. In this paper we give a short overview of the features of LifeV and its coding paradigms on simple problems. The main focus is on the parallel environment which is mainly driven by domain decomposition methods and based on external libraries such as MPI, the Trilinos project, HDF5 and ParMetis. Dedicated to the memory of Fausto Saleri.