Draft:preCICE (software)

preCICE

Developer(s)	University of Stuttgart, Technical University of Munich, and the preCICE community
Initial release	June 1, 2010 (2010-06-01)
Stable release	3.1.2  / 6 June 2024
Repository	github.com/precice/precice
Written in	C++
Operating system	Linux, macOS
Predecessor	FSI*ce
Type	simulation software, fluid structure interaction
License	LGPL-3.0-or-later
Website	precice.org

preCICE (precise code interaction coupling environment) is TODO.

History

The Technical University of Munich, together with other collaborators, started the German Research Foundation Research Group FOR493 titled "Fluid-Structure Interaction: Modelling, Simulation, Optimisation" in 2003.

The name "preCICE" appears in literature first in 2010. preCICE is a direct successor of a previous tool called FSI*ce (stylized FSI❄ce), developed at the Technical University of Munich, and mainly targeting fluid-structure interaction simulations. preCICE replaced FSI*ce in 2010, which is not developed anymore.

In May 2015, the development of preCICE was moved to its own organization on GitHub, which now includes repositories for the core library and several further components of the project. The first stable version of the core library was released in November 2017 (v1.0.0). At that time, the documentation of the project was hosted in a GitHub Wiki. The state of preCICE v1.0.0 is largely as described in what is accepted as "v1 reference paper", published in 2016, together with collaborators from the University of Stuttgart. The paper describes the core library, with main features being a variety of coupling schemes (explicit and implicit, Aitken underrelaxation, IQN and IMVJ quasi-Newton algorithms), data mapping methods (nearest-neighbor, nearest-projection, RBF), and communication methods (TCP/IP sockets, MPI ports). The paper also includes a list of coupled codes developed by the authors or collaborators, as well as FSI benchmarks demonstrating numerical accuracy and performance scalability. The v1.x release cycle saw releases until v1.6.1, on September 2019.

preCICE v2

API

The native API of preCICE is written in C++. Language bindings for C and Fortran are compiled into the preCICE library itself. Further language bindings are available externally.

Language	Repository	License	Package	Usage
C++	precice on GitHub	LGPL-3.0-or-later	GitHub Releases	#include<precice/precice.hpp> precice::Participant p(…);
C				#include<precice/preciceC.h> preciceC_createParticipant(…);
Fortran				CALL precicef_create(…)
Python	python-bindings on GitHub	LGPL-3.0-or-later	PyPi	import precice p = precice.Participant(…)
Fortran Module	fortran-module on GitHub	LGPL-3.0-or-later		use precice CALL precicef_create(…)
Rust	rust-bindings on GitHub	LGPL-3.0-or-later	crates.io	use precice let mut participant = precice::Participant::new(…);
Julia	PreCICE.jl on GitHub	LGPL-3.0-or-later		using PreCICE PreCICE.createParticipant(…)
Matlab	matlab-bindings on GitHub	LGPL-3.0-or-later		p = precice.Participant(…)

Example

import precice

Coupled codes

While preCICE is a software library with an API that can be used by programmers to couple their own code, there exist several integrations with several simulation codes, making preCICE more accessible to end users that are not primarily programmers (such as applied mathematicians, mechanical engineers, or climate scientists).

In the terminology used by preCICE, the integrations to simulation codes are called adapters and can be maintained by the preCICE developers or third parties. A non-exhaustive list of adapters is available on the preCICE website.

Example codes that preCICE integrates with via ready-to-use adapters include, among others:

• CalculiX
• deal.II
• DUNE
• Elmer
• FEBio
• FEniCS
• OpenFOAM
• SU2

See also

• Multiphysics simulation
• List of numerical analysis software
• List of finite element software packages
• Fluid-structure interaction
• Computer-aided engineering