All:
Today is deal.II's 25th anniversary: The first commit to the deal.II
repository (then managed by CVS) was on November 24, 1997, exactly 25
years ago!
At the time, I was a student starting my Master's in the lab of Rolf
Rannacher at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. Back then, the
lab was using two other libraries: Stefan Turek was using and writing
software called FEATFLOW, written in Fortran, which today lives on as
FEAST (http://www.feast.tu-dortmund.de/index.html); and Guido
Kanschat, Franz-Theo Suttmeier, and Roland Becker were writing a
software called DEAL, short for "differential equations analysis
library", which today lives on in the Gascoigne library
(https://gascoigne.math.uni-magdeburg.de/). So there was some history
in writing finite element packages.
Guido Kanschat, who at the time was a postdoc, became my Master's
adviser, and we talked about what software to use for my project. He
knew that I was a decent software designer and felt that DEAL had some
software design shortcomings. He had the experience what mathematical
representations could be used to support adaptive finite elements with
hanging nodes. So we decided that I should take a few classes from
DEAL (like FullMatrix -- a class that to this day has some members
whose names and argument order don't match the deal.II convention) and
with his help write some others from scratch. I re-used a design
pattern I had explored a bit in the summer of 1997: Using <int dim> as
a template argument for classes. We called the project "deal.II": The
second version of the DEAL library.
I worked on all of this by myself for a couple of months, and then
Guido joined in the software development work; eventually also my
academic brother Ralf Hartmann, who was doing his Master's at the same
time as me. By the summer we had something that worked for adaptive
meshes in 2d, and mostly in 3d, for continuous elements of moderate
order.
Ralf and I graduated with a Master's at the end of 1998, but decided
to stay on for a PhD. Guido continued as a postdoc. All three of us
developed whatever it was we needed for our research, and sometime in
2000, we created a website for it and uploaded it there. Because we
thought that a version 1.0 sounded so immature, we called the version
that was uploaded 3.0. None of us had any hopes for this website. This
is just what one did in 2000: The web was new, why not create a
website?
I do remember that we were all a bit surprised when people started
using the software. They also asked questions, and so a mailing list
was created, and I remember us having to think about writing more
documentation. None of this had been on our agenda: That the library
found users was, really, all just an accident. But it grew from there.
Of course, today everything looks vastly different from these small
beginnings. There are hundreds, maybe thousands of people using
it. There are a dozen principal developers. We know of more than 2,100
publications that use deal.II. We review every patch. There is a test
suite that contains more than 13,000 tests, and each patch is run on
half a dozen machines before it can be merged. deal.II can interface
with more than 25 other packages, and it has nearly 1.5 million lines
of source code -- the product of what is almost certainly several
hundred person-years of work. More than 300 people are listed as
having contributed substantial pieces of work. One could probably
write a whole paper about how all of this happened, but maybe that is
not the time to do so: let's just celebrate the 25th birthday today,
and that this little thing has grown into something that has turned
out to be useful to so many in our community!
........................................................................
Today is also Thanksgiving in the United States where I live
today. This is traditionally where people, quite literally, give
thanks for whatever they are grateful for. For me personally, I am
thankful for the fact that what started as a small project for myself
and a couple of colleagues has grown into a worldwide community. It
has allowed me to build a career, and it has allowed me to meet many
people from around the world who I would likely never have met
otherwise; many of them I call my friends today. It is something I
could not have imagined 25 years ago, and something I am truly
grateful for.
Best
Wolfgang
--
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Wolfgang Bangerth email: [email protected]
www: http://www.math.colostate.edu/~bangerth/
--
The deal.II project is located at http://www.dealii.org/
For mailing list/forum options, see
https://groups.google.com/d/forum/dealii?hl=en
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "deal.II User Group" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email
to [email protected].
To view this discussion on the web visit
https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/dealii/766a75ca-6d80-847b-32ab-aa1926151a0a%40colostate.edu.
