The NetFEM library makes it easy to view the output of a parallel unstructured mesh computation.

The NetFEM client GUI can extract the mesh from a running program or read the mesh from an output file. The GUI uses VTK to display the mesh.

NetFEM Movie Mode

This is a simple2D FEM simulation run using 16 processors and 600,000 triangular elements. It represents 5000 timesteps, where each step took 3.5 seconds of serial work. On a serial machine, this would take over 4 hours; but using the FEM framework on 16 processors, it took under 20 minutes.

To generate this movie, we used NetFEM in offline mode to write a series of output dumps. We then rendered the movie's frames using the ``Render Movie'' command in the NetFEM GUI, which writes out PPM image files named ``netfem_timestep.ppm''. We then build an MPEG using the mpeg_encode tools.
 

The NetFEM server-side library is integrated into the Charm++/Converse distribution. Please download the source distribution and build the by specifying the target "FEM" or "AMPI" to the Charm++ build command. (For details, see the README file in the source distribution.)

The NetFEM programming interface is described in detail in the NetFEM Manual. [postscript] [PDF] [html]

The GUI is not part of Charm++; you must download it separately:

• NetFEM Linux GUI, including source code and a prebuild binary. This is the most up-to-date version.
• NetFEM Windows GUI.
• NetFEM Linux server, also available as charm/pgms/charm++/fem/simple2D/.

• Orion Sky Lawlor
• Isaac Dooley

• Charm++ FEM Framework