dolfin team mailing list archive

[Johan Jansson <jjan@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Anders Logg wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 15, 2008 at 10:22:41PM -0500, Gideon Simpson wrote:
>   
> > Scratch that.  I discovered COMSOL does something very nice that boosts the
> > quality of its results.  If I have a curved boundary on my geometry, COMSOL
> > will interpolate the associated quadrature on the cells along that boundary to
> > improve accuracy.  When I turn that feature off, the results are consistent
> > with what I'm getting from FEniCS.
> >
> > But the question remains: are there any benchmarks?
> >     
>
> I think Andy Terrel did a few benchmarks which were actually for
> Stokes. Lot's of things have happened since, but if he reads this he
> can probably point you to a copy of his master thesis on the subject.
>
> Although I don't have any numbers, I expect the assembly of the linear
> system to be very fast in DOLFIN (or we did something wrong and can
> fix it).
>
> For the linear solve, we just trust PETSc and the preconditioners
> available there.
>
> For the method, it's up to you to formulate it using any of the
> elements available in DOLFIN. The speed/accuracy will depend on the
> choice of element.
>   
I helped a colleague with a project where we solved the same problem 
(Poisson with tensor coefficients) with FEniCS and Comsol. Though we 
didn't do any detailed benchmarks, it seemed that FEniCS was several 
factors faster (and also several factors more memory conservative), this 
was also the reason for trying out FEniCS: that Comsol was inefficient.

If there are people interested in a benchmark project (i.e. a paper or 
course project) we could collect benchmark problems with implementations 
in various systems and do detailed benchmarking. I also expect FEniCS to 
come out on top in assembly. If it's the case that it's several factors 
faster, then perhaps it's important that it's documented.

 Johan