My first project on the quest for a Julia finite element method is a simple homework problem. Just some background, this is for UC Irvine’s graduate Computational PDEs 226B course where in the first quarter we did all sorts of finite difference methods and now is our first foray into finite element methods. The purpose of the project is to grasp the data structure enough to use simple tools (i.e. mesh creation and plotting) to create a finite element solver for Poisson’s equation in 2D and check the performance differences. For those who haven’t programmed much this is a great learning exercise, but being a pretty standard exercise the MATLAB code took no time to writeup and so I started thinking: how does Julia compare to MATLAB for solving simple PDEs with the finite element method?

Testing this would take … READ MORE