Finite Element Discretization Library
                             version 3.0
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                     http://mfem.googlecode.com

MFEM is a modular parallel C++ library for finite element methods. Its goal is to enable the research and development of scalable finite element discretization and solver algorithms through general finite element abstractions, accurate and flexible visualization, and tight integration with the hypre library.

For building instructions, see the file INSTALL, or type "make help". Copyright information and licensing restrictions can be found in the file COPYRIGHT.

The best starting point for new users interested in MFEM's features is the interactive documentation in examples/README.html.

Conceptually, MFEM can be viewed as a finite element toolbox that provides the building blocks for developing finite element algorithms in a manner similar to that of MATLAB for linear algebra methods. In particular, MFEM provides support for arbitrary high-order H1-conforming, discontinuous (L2), H(div)-conforming, H(curl)-conforming and NURBS finite element spaces in 2D and 3D, as well as many bilinear, linear and nonlinear forms defined on them. It enables the quick prototyping of various finite element discretizations, including Galerkin methods, mixed finite elements, Discontinuous Galerkin (DG), isogeometric analysis and Discontinuous Petrov-Galerkin (DPG) approaches.

MFEM includes classes for dealing with a wide range of mesh types: triangular, quadrilateral, tetrahedral and hexahedral, as well as surface and topologically periodical meshes. It has general support for mesh refinement, including local conforming and non-conforming (AMR) adaptive refinement. Arbitrary element transformations, allowing for high-order mesh elements with curved boundaries, are also supported.

MFEM is commonly used as a "finite element to linear algebra translator", since it can take a problem described in terms of finite element-type objects, and produce the corresponding linear algebra vectors and sparse matrices. In order to facilitate this, MFEM uses compressed sparse row (CSR) sparse matrix storage and includes simple smoothers and Krylov solvers, such as PCG, MINRES and GMRES, as well as support for sequential sparse direct solvers from the SuiteSparse library. Nonlinear solvers (the Newton method), and several explicit and implicit Runge-Kutta time integrators are also available.

MFEM supports MPI-based parallelism throughout the library, and can readily be used as a scalable unstructured finite element problem generator. MFEM-based applications require minimal changes to transition from a serial to a high-performing parallel version of the code, where they can take advantage of the integrated scalable linear solvers from the hypre library. An experimental support for OpenMP acceleration is also included.

For examples of using MFEM, see the examples/ directory, as well as the OpenGL visualization tool GLVis which is available at http://glvis.googlecode.com.