The 4C Multiphysics Framework
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The multiphysics simulation framework 4C (Comprehensive Computational Community Code) is a versatile, open-source research code for the numerical simulation of challenging multiphysics phenomena. Building on more than 20 years of research and development, 4C can model a plethora of physical systems, including solid mechanics, fluid dynamics, scalar transport, and chemical reaction among others. Its particular strength lies in the simulation of multiphysics systems and their coupling interactions with applications in science, engineering, and biomedicine as well as its extensibility to create new multiphysics solvers from existing building blocks with a unified code framework. 4C mainly implements finite element methods (FEM), but also offers alternative discretization methods such as discontinuous Galerkin methods or particle methods. 4C is written in C++ and uses MPI for distributed memory hardware architectures. While physical models and coupling algorithms are implemented in the 4C source code directly, it relies on external dependencies for more general capabilities, for example among others on Trilinos for linear algebra or ArborX [3] for efficient search strategies. In this presentation, we will outline the research philosophy driving the development of 4C as well as 4C’s design principles. We will discuss 4C’s embedding into the open-source community and its interoperability with other software frameworks. We will provide an overview of existing simulation capabilities and showcase selected multiphysics applications.
