1.1 Philosophy

The CHARM++ FEM framework is designed to be flexible, in that it provided a few very general operations, such as loading and partitioning a ``mesh.'' In describing these operations, we draw on examples from structural analysis, but in fact the same calls can be used for other applications, including fluid dynamics or partial differential equations solvers, or even general-purpose graph manipulation.

For example, the FEM framework does not specify the number of spatial dimensions. Node locations are treated as just another kind of node data, with no restrictions on the number of data items. This allows the FEM framework to work with problems having any number of spatial dimensions.