Jive: An open source, research-oriented C plus plus library for solving partial differential equations

A majority of physical models are written as partial differential equations. For most of these equations, analytical solutions cannot be obtained and they can be solved only numerically using e.g. the finite element method. To not waste time programming, it is vital for researchers working on state-of-the-art numerical methods to adopt a flexible, efficient, open source and research-oriented library designed to solve partial differential equations for their work. This paper describes such a library named Jive. This numerical library, written in C++, can be used to implement any numerical method. Here, we describe the overall features of Jive. Moreover, as Jive has proven to be well adapted to finite element methods, in particular, we go on to present ofeFRAC, our in-house finite element code for damage and fracture mechanics applications written on top of Jive. We demonstrate that using Jive allows us to quickly write efficient codes for testing new models and methods.