Course content

The FEniCS Project (www.fenicsproject.org) is a collection of open source software for the automated, efficient solution of partial differential equations. The software specifying finite element variational problems in close to mathematical form and, via automated code generation techniques, the automated assembly and solution of such. This is a powerful and exciting combination that enables rapid, reliable and fun development of efficient finite element models.

This two-day short course will consist of short lectures in combination with hands-on exercises aimed at novice FEniCS users: starting from the very basics to solving non-trivial, nonlinear, time-dependent PDEs. The last session will also cover more advanced topics such as PDE-constrained optimisation via dolfin-adjoint.

Requirements

Software requirements

Please bring your own laptop. The course will be based on

• FEniCS (www.fenicsproject.org)
• dolfin-adjoint (www.dolfin-adjoint.org)

We will also use

• Jupyter Notebook (www.jupyter.org)
• SciPy (www.scipy.org)

Note that we will use the development version of the FEniCS and dolfin-adjoint software.

Installation instructions

We'll devote the first session to installation, so please feel free to arrive at the course without FEniCS preinstalled.

Installation instructions for FEniCS are available here: http://fenicsproject.org/download/.

As you can see, there are many ways to install FEniCS -- we'll use the Docker approach:

http://fenicsproject.org/download/#docker-images-all-platforms-and-versions-hspace-dockerimage

How to install and run FEniCS for the NGCM 2016 Summer Academy

1. Go to the "Docker images" section of fenicsproject.org/download
2. Follow - Step 1: Install Docker, including testing your installation - Step 2: Download 'fenicsproject' script
3. Run (in your terminal/Docker Terminal for Mac/Windows) $ fenicsproject help

3. Open a new "FEniCS" project, by running $ fenicsproject notebook ngcm2016 dev NB: This may take some time (depending on the internet connection) This command will create a persistent FEniCS session, named 'ngcm2016', using the dev version of FEniCS and with the Jupyter notebook.
4. Start your FEniCS session with $ fenicsproject start ngcm2016 This should give you a message like "You can access the Jupyter notebook at http://localhost:3000". Point a webbrowser at that location.
5. Voila, a Jupyter session should have appeared
6. Open a new Notebook by pressing the New -> Notebook (Python 2)
7. Test your FEniCS installation by entering this in a Cell from dolfin import * print dolfin.__version__- and execute. The output should read: 2016.1.0dev
8. Test your installation further by running the fenics_test.ipynb notebook located here.

Required knowledge

• Knowledge of partial differential equations
• Knowledge of numerical simulation of differential equations
• Basic knowledge of Python
• Basic knowledge of the finite element method

Training team

Trainer: Dr. Marie E. Rognes

Infrastructure

• Slack channel "fenics"