[Dune-devel] Non linear mechanics, Dune, MFront

[HELFER Thomas 202608]

Hi Christophe,
I am really grateful that you take the time to make this answer.
This is very helpful as I am still don't have a complete overview of the project and 
I'll take your advices into account as I continue my "exploration".
I am really pleased to see the kind answers that my initial post has received.
This is very positive and encouraging.
Regards,
Thomas

________________________________________
De : Christoph Grüninger [foss at grueninger.de]
Envoyé : dimanche 29 mars 2020 21:24
À : HELFER Thomas 202608; dune-devel at lists.dune-project.org
Objet : Re: [Dune-devel] Non linear mechanics, Dune, MFront

Hi Thomas,
great to hear that you are evaluating the Dune project. Your topic
sounds interesting, even though I am neither a mechanical guy nor
involved in nuclear energy topics.

I want to give you a hint regarding Dune (politics) and the groups
contributing to it.
- There are Dune core modules (common, geometry, istl, grid,
localfunctions). A lot of people contribute to them and they are mature.
- There are two big discretization modules PDELab and Dune-fem. You seem
to have started with the latter. These discreization modules are great
and very useful, but for each only a part of the Dune community is using
and maintaining them.
- There are application modules, based on top of the Dune core modules
providing everything they need themselves. Examples are DuMuX or Kaskade
7. It's a choice between writing stuff yourself and keeping control
versus profiting and being dependent on code of a smaller groups.
- For a couple of years, dune-functions offers a great way of getting
your discretisations done. PDELab uses it internally, too.

If I had to write my own module with my own discretisation, I would
choose dune-functions. To me, the risk to be dependent on too few people
seems the lowest and you don't rely on much complicated code you could
hardly maintain yourself.
But please, take my advice with a grain of salt, as I wrote my diploma
thesis using PDELab and my PhD thesis was based on DuMuX. I never used
Dune-fem or dune-functions directly myself.
Other members of the Dune community for sure have different options. If
you want to base your research code for the years to come on Dune,
that's a crucial choice. You might also want to get to know some people
behind the projects. Unfortunately for you, we recently had our yearly
developer meeting and there are currently no plans for a user meeting in
the near future.

One more thing: What requirements on the grid do you have? Dune has
bindings to three big, feature-rich grid managers: ALUGrid, UG, and
Alberta. Often you can stay neutral and support all three of them, but
sometimes you have to choose as you have to rely on specific, unique
features. If you give us more insight into your problems, we might help
you with (personally biased) recommendations.

I hope I didn't offend anybody or scared Thomas away.

Bye,
Christoph

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