Ratel: Extensible, performance-portable solid mechanics¶
Ratel is a solid mechanics library and applications based on libCEED and PETSc with support for efficient high-order elements and CUDA and ROCm GPUs.
Solid mechanics simulations provide vital information for many engineering applications, using a large amount of computational resources from workstation to supercomputing scales. The industry standard for implicit analysis uses assembled sparse matrices with low-order elements, typically \(Q_1\) hexahedral and \(P_2\) tetrahedral elements, with the linear systems solved using sparse direct solvers, algebraic multigrid, or multilevel domain decomposition. This approach has two fundamental inefficiencies: poor approximation accuracy per Degree of Freedom (DoF) and high computational and memory cost per DoF due to choice of data structures and algorithms. High-order finite elements implemented in a matrix-free fashion with appropriate preconditioning strategies can overcome these inefficiencies.
For further details on the benefits of high-order, matrix-free finite elements for solid mechanics, see our preprint on arXiv.
Fig. 1 Ratel badger moving simulation¶
Indices and tables¶
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