Thu 23 June 2016
As part of the NGCM Summer Academy 2016, Professor Marie Rognes delivered a two days workshop on FEniCS, a collaborative project for the development of innovative concepts and tools for automated scientific computing. Specifically, the workshop focused on the problem-solving environment dolfin, with particular attention to the resolution of partial differential equations via finite element methods.
On the first day, the participants have been introduced to FEniCS through a series of examples and exercises of increasing complexity. Professor Marie Rognes illustrated the mathematical framework of the finite elements method and how to implement typical finite elements problems with FEniCS. The students employed the Jupyter notebook writing all the code in Python language.
From the first day a series of challenges were proposed to the class, pushing the students to solve the problems as fast as they can or in the most accurate way. At the end of the challenges, Prof. Rognes declared the winners and gave to them ad hoc prizes. The Slack app was employed during all the workshop, allowing the class to share material and to help each other. This app was also used for the competition process, allowing the students to see results in real time.
In the second day, Professor Rognes continued the workshop introducing dolfin adjoint, focusing on the resolution of optimisation problems. The workshop was captivating and really instructive, it is suggested to all those work with finite elements and want to learn a new efficient tool.
Posted by Emanuele Zappia