mfem VS dealii

MFEM (mfem.org) is one of the most active open-source partial differential equation (PDE) solver projects in recent years. Although this open source package is positioned as a lightweight and scalable C++ library, it provides higher-order finite element spaces, supports mixed elements, discontinuous Galerkin elements, isogeometric analysis methods, and more. In particular, it has great advantages in high-performance computing, not only supports message passing interface (MPI) parallelism and shared memory parallelism (OpenMP), but also has good strength in GPU parallel computing. The built-in post-processing program GLVis can easily read and display the result files. The BSD-3 license is also extremely friendly to developers. Recently, MFEM supports Python programming, which makes the library more convenient for various types of researchers.

If you are looking for something more numerically intensive, check out MFEM: https://mfem.org. Lots of examples in the gallery there; lots of cool higher order curved meshes and physics problems to play with. Probably a higher learning curve than some of your other options.

If you're interested in a FEM framework designed by computer scientists and mathematicians, MFEM has treated me well. Maybe just something to compare to.

We currently have several solvers of our own, as well as interfacing with MPI capable solvers via mfem. We are currently a pre and post processor for several NASTRAN based solvers using our meshing free method.

MFEM

I’m working on MFEM. It is a Finite Element Method (FEM) library. Some of the work would require knowledge of the FEM but there’s a lot of stuff like implementing operators in vector classes that you could do too!

For what concerns FEM, I think DealII is a great library with an outstanding documentation and tutorial: https://www.dealii.org/