Akantu: Swiss-Made Open-Source Finite-Element Library

Akantu means a little element in Kinyarwanda, a Bantu language. From now on it is also an open- source object-oriented library which has the ambi- tion to be generic and efficient.

Building Akantu

Dependencies

In order to compile Akantu any compiler supporting fully C++14 should work. In addition some libraries are required:

• CMake (>= 3.5.1)
• Boost (preprocessor and Spirit)
• zlib
• blas/lapack

For the python interface:

• Python (>=3 is recommended)
• pybind11 (if not present the build system will try to download it)

To run parallel simulations:

• MPI
• Scotch

To use the static or implicit dynamic solvers at least one of the following libraries is needed:

• MUMPS (since this is usually compiled in static you also need MUMPS dependencies)
• PETSc

To compile the tests and examples:

• Gmsh
• google-test (if not present the build system will try to download it)

On .deb based systems

 sh
> sudo apt install cmake libboost-dev zlib-dev liblapack-dev libblas-dev gmsh
# For parallel
> sudo apt install mpi-default-dev libmumps-dev 
# For sequential
> sudo apt install libmumps-seq-dev

Configuring and compilation

Akantu is a CMake project, so to configure it, you can follow the usual way:

sh
 > cd akantu
 > mkdir build
 > cd build
 > ccmake ..
 [ Set the options that you need ]
 > make
 > make install

Using the python interface

You can install `Akantu` using pip, this will install a pre-compiled version:

sh
 > pip install akantu

You can then import the package in a python script as:

python
 import akantu

The python API is similar to the C++ one. If you encounter any problem with the python interface, you are welcome to do a merge request or post an issue on GitLab.

Tutorials with the python interface

To help getting started, multiple tutorials using the python interface are available as notebooks with pre-installed version of Akantu on Binder. The following tutorials are currently available:

Plate whith a hole loaded

Loaded cohesive crack

Making your constitutive law in python