README.orig

Welcome to FETK (The Finite Element ToolKit).

FETK is developed and maintained by the Mathematical and Computational 
Physics Group in the Mathematics and Physics Departments at UC San Diego,
together with colleagues from around the world.  The development effort 
is based in the Center for Computational Mathematics at UCSD.  For more 
detailed information about FETK, see the FETK.org website:

    http://FETK.org/

In brief, FETK consists of a number of finite element modeling 
software libraries that depend on each other in a hierarchical way.
The dependencies in the core FETK libraries are:

   MALOC
     |
     |-----> SG     .....
     |                   \
     |-----> PUNC   ----> MC
     |                   /
     |-----> GAMer  ..../

The solid lines mean that there is a build dependency; the dotted lines 
means that there is run-time dependency, in that additional capabilities 
are provided to MC if either/both of SG and/or GAMer have been built.
FETK is based around a GNU autoconf build framework; you can build each 
library independently, or you can build the entire FETK suite using a 
script we provide (see below).  Below is a brief summary of what the 
core libraries do.

MALOC (Minimal Abstraction Layer for Object-oriented C):
  All of the FETK libraries depend on the single low-level abstraction 
  library MALOC (as does several tools developed separately from FETK, 
  such as APBS; see the ABPS website for more information about APBS).
  See the FETK website for more information about MALOC.

PUNC (Portable Understructure for Numerical Computing):
  The MC library (below) depends on having access to a standard set 
  of numerical libraries such as BLAS, LAPACK, SuperLU, UMFPACK, ARPACK,
  and a few other tools.  PUNC looks for these on the given platform,
  and builds them if it is unable to locate a functioning library;
  after building and installing PUNC, the MC library is assured of having
  access to all of the standard libraries on which it depends.
  See the FETK website for more information about PUNC.

SG (Socket Graphics):
  The SG library provides a very lightweight polygon visualization
  and manipulation tool, similar to Geomview but is much simpler.
  It does do three things that Geomview does not do:
    (1) It accepts Geomview OFF input as well as several other formats.
    (2) It accepts input from files, pipes, buffers, UNIX sockets, and
        also INET sockets (both UNIX and Windows via Winsock).
    (3) It generates exact postscript renderings using the Painter's
        Algorithm, by solving linear programming problems to determine
        a feasible point in the set of correct rendering orders.
  See the FETK website for more information about SG.

GAMer (Geometry-preservering Adaptiver Mesher):
  The GAMer library is a surface and volume mesh generator based on
  standard simplex generation, smoothing, and subdivision algorithms.
  It was designed for modeling molecular surfaces, but is a general
  meshing tool that can be used for many applications.  It generates
  meshing files that are compatible mesh input files for MC (see below).
  GAMer employs both Triangle and Tetgen as auxilliary triangulation 
  and tetrahedralization tools.  See the FETK website for more information
  about GAMer.

MC (Manifold Code):
  The MC library is a finite element modeling library for discretizing
  and solving coupled systems of elliptic and parabolic partial differential
  equations on both 2D and 3D domains.  It has been designed to allow for
  the representation of 2- and 3-manifold domains, and the discretization
  of elliptic and parabolic differential operators on these types of domains.
  It has been used to simulate problems ranging from molecular systems
  to black holes.  See the FETK website for more information about MC.

The simplest way to build the entire FETK suite of libraries is the
using the "fetk-build" script in the main FETK directory.

Have fun.

-michael holst 
 Mon Jun 28 10:27:39 PDT 2010