# What’s New in GetFEM 1.7¶

Released, 2005/01/05:

• An important number of improvements have been done on GetFEM 1.7. Note that the next release will be GetFEM 2.0, some of its changes won’t maintain backward compatibility with GetFEM 1.7:
• Introduction of the model brick system, which provides a general framework for the solution of common PDEs. Each brick is dedicated to a specific task (i.e. “handle Dirichlet conditions”, “assembly of the Stokes Problem”, “solve a linear system”, etc.). These bricks are then connected to each other. Examples of use can be found in the “tests/” directory of GetFEM.
• New models : Small strain plasticity, large strain elasticity, contact and friction conditions, linearized plates, incompressibility in small and large strain elasticity.
• Simplifications and optimizations in elementary computations.
• A direct sparse solver (SuperLU 3.0) is available “out of the box”.
• Ability to export results to VTK and OpenDX.
• Major changes in Gmm++ 1.7:
• New preconditioner ILUTP.
• A BFGS algorithm has been developed.
• Gmm++ now handles (valid) operations mixing complex and scalars.
• gmm::real_part(V) and gmm::imag_part(V) gives a possibly writable reference on the real and imaginary part of a complex vector or matrix.
• The SuperLU interface has been updated for SuperLU 3.0.

getfem-matlab has been renamed “getfem-interface” since it now provides an interface for Matlab and Python (with the Numarray package). Note that, while it is documented and working, the python interface is still considered a work in progress. You have to enable it explicitly with ./configure --enable-python. An interface to the Gmm++ sparse matrices and solvers is also provided.