suanPan

[!IMPORTANT]

Feature requests can be made via creating new issues.

Check out the VS Code extension for syntax highlighting and autocompletion.

Check out the documentation for a summary of all available functionalities.

Please star ⭐ the project!

Introduction

🧮 suanPan is a finite element method (FEM) simulation platform for applications in fields such as solid mechanics and civil/structural/seismic engineering. suanPan is written in modern high-quality C++ code and is targeted to provide an efficient, concise, flexible and reliable FEM simulation platform.

suanPan is partially influenced by popular (non-)commercial FEA packages, such as ABAQUS UNIFIED FEA, ANSYS and OpenSees.

Activities

Features

The highlights of suanPan are

✅ fast, memory and thread safe
✅ shared memory parallelism support
✅ distributed memory parallelism support
✅ multi-architecture (amd64 and arm64) support
✅ rich collection of elements, materials, time integration methods, etc.
✅ open source and easy to extend
✅ modern language features

Quick Start

Execute the application out-of-the-box in terminal on Linux using one of the following commands depending on how the application is obtained. See details below.

# in folder bin/ for linux portable tarball
./suanPan.sh
# for linux packages and snap
suanPan
# for flatpak
flatpak run io.github.tlcfem.suanPan

Or on Windows,

# in the folder containing suanPan.exe
.\suanPan.exe

First time users can use overview command to go through a quick introduction.

+--------------------------------------------------------+
|             ____             suanPan is an open source |
|   ___ _   _|  _ \ __ _ _ __     FEM framework (64-bit) |
|  / __| | | | |_) / _` | '_ \           Canopus (3.7.0) |
|  \__ \ |_| |  __/ (_| | | | |        by tlc @ c34df242 |
|  |___/\__,_|_|   \__,_|_| |_|      all rights reserved |
|                                 10.5281/zenodo.1285221 |
+--------------------------------------------------------+
|  https://github.com/TLCFEM/suanPan                     |
|  https://tlcfem.github.io/suanPan-manual/latest        |
+--------------------------------------------------------+
|  https://bit.ly/vsc-sp                                 |
+--------------------------------------------------------+

suanPan ~<> overview

Sample models are available for almost all models/commands. Please check the Example folder for details. Further details can be seen here regarding how to run model files.

Installation

[!TIP] Daily debug builds can be downloaded via this page.

[!WARNING] Only the 64-bit version is compiled. It is assumed that AVX2 is available thus if the program fails, please check if your CPU supports AVX2. Alternatively, you can try the no-avx version.

Windows

[!NOTE] The dependencies are bundled with the archive. One may also install the VC++ redistributable package. If the application prompts that some file, such as msvcp140.dll, is missing (unlikely), please install the redistributable package.

Binary Package

The archives of binaries are released under Release page.

suanpan-win-mkl-vtk.zip is the portable archive.
suanpan-win-mkl-vtk.exe is the installer.

Chocolatey

The binaries, which are compiled with Intel MKL and VTK, are available on Chocolatey, please use the following command to install the package.

Follow the instructions to install Chocolatey.
Use the following command to install suanPan.
```
choco install suanpan
```
It is recommended to use a modern terminal such as Windows Terminal for better output display.

The Chocolatey repo available to you may not be up-to-date. If the latest version is not available, please try alternatives, such as portable binaries or scoop.

Scoop

It is also possible to use Scoop to install the package.

Install Scoop.

Set-ExecutionPolicy RemoteSigned -scope CurrentUser
iwr -useb get.scoop.sh | iex

Install suanPan.
```
scoop install suanpan
```

Code Signing Policy

Free code signing provided by SignPath.io, certificate by SignPath Foundation.

This program will not transfer any information to other networked systems unless specifically requested by the user or the person installing or operating it.

Linux

Linux users are recommended to obtain the binaries via snap or flatpak.

Snap

The snap supports visualisation via VTK and uses Intel MKL for linear algebra. The edge channel is in sync with the dev branch. The stable channel is in sync with the master branch.

Flatpak

Flatpak is also available if preferred. The beta channel is in sync with the dev branch. The stable channel is in sync with the master branch.

# add repo
flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub https://flathub.org/repo/flathub.flatpakrepo
# or the beta channel
# flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub-beta https://flathub.org/beta-repo/flathub-beta.flatpakrepo
# install
flatpak install suanPan
# define alias
echo "alias suanpan=\"flatpak run io.github.tlcfem.suanPan --\"" >> ~/.bashrc

macOS

The portable binary archives are provided for macOS 14 and 15 with both amd64 and arm64 architectures. The archives themselves are self-contained. They can be successfully executed on earlier versions of macOS.

[!CAUTION] The binaries are not signed. It is necessary to run sudo xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine <downloaded/archive/folder> to remove extra attribute.
DOWNLOAD_URL="https://github.com/TLCFEM/suanPan/releases/download/suanPan-v3.9.3/suanPan-macos-14-amd64-openblas-avx.tar.gz"
curl -L "$DOWNLOAD_URL" -o suanPan-latest.tar.gz
mkdir -p suanPan && tar -xzf suanPan-latest.tar.gz -C suanPan && cd suanPan
sudo xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine .
./suanPan.sh
The download link should be replaced with one appropriate for your system and requirements.

Docker

It is also possible to compile the package via docker, check the dockerfiles under the Script folder, for any questions please open an issue.

One can directly pull the image. Using Docker Hub.

docker pull tlcfem/suanpan

Using GitHub Container Registry.

docker pull ghcr.io/tlcfem/suanpan

Other Platforms

Precompiled binaries are provided via CI/CD on macOS, Windows, and Ubuntu. Please download the file from the release page.

A few flavors are available:

vtk — visualisation support is enabled, with this you can record VTK files for postprocessing, however, OpenGL may be missing on server systems
mkl — linear algebra operations are offloaded to MKL, which gives the optimal performance on Intel chips
openblas — linear algebra operations are offloaded to OpenBLAS, which may outperform MKL on AMD platforms
aocl — linear algebra operations are offloaded to AOCL, which is optimized for AMD platforms
no-avx — AVX2 support is disabled, useful for older CPUs that do not support AVX2 instructions
win-gcc — GCC is used to compile the binary
win — MSVC is used to compile the binary

Advanced users can compile the program from source by themselves to enable GPU based solvers which require an available CUDA and/or MAGMA library.

VS Code

The VS Code extension is available here. It provides syntax highlighting, autocompletion, running the model using the specified executable or docker container.

Sublime Text

On Windows, a batch file named AddAssociation.bat is provided in the archive. It provides file associations and prepares a proper working environment (build system, autocompletion, highlighting) with Sublime Text. It also adds file associations with .sp and .supan files, please run the AddAssociation.bat file with administrator privilege. Sublime Text autocompletion and syntax highlighting files are also provided. Please install Sublime Text first and execute the batch file with the administrator privilege.

On Linux, a script file named as suanPan.sh is provided.

./suanPan.sh --create-link

The above command adds Sublime Text autocompletion and syntax highlighting files to proper location if Sublime Text configuration folder is found. It also adds a command alias suanpan to ~/.local/bin and a desktop file to ~/.local/share/applications.

Dependency

Additional libraries used in suanPan are listed as follows.

AMD Optimizing CPU Libraries (AOCL) version 5.1
ARPACK
Armadillo version 15.2.2
CUDA version 12.9
Catch2 version 3.11.0
FEAST version 4.0
HDF5 version 1.14.6
MAGMA version 2.9.0
OpenBLAS version 0.3.30
SPIKE version 1.0
SuperLU MT version 4.0.0
SuperLU version 7.0.1
TBB Threading Building Blocks version 2022.3.0
VTK version 9.5.2
argparse
exprtk version 0.0.3
ezp
fmt version 12.0.0
magic_enum version 0.9.7
oneMKL version 2025.2.0
whereami
thread_pool abridged version of thread-pool

Those libraries may depend on other libraries such as zlib and Szip. Additional tools may be used by suanPan, they are

UPX the Ultimate Packer for eXecutables

How To Compile

Please refer to the corresponding page in the manual for details.

Happy Modelling

an example simulation of particle collision

suanPan

🧮 An Open Source, Parallel and Heterogeneous Finite Element Analysis Framework

suanPan

Introduction

Features

Quick Start

Installation

Windows

Binary Package

Chocolatey

Scoop

Code Signing Policy

Linux

Snap

Flatpak

macOS

Docker

Other Platforms

VS Code

Sublime Text

Dependency

How To Compile

Happy Modelling

Licence

suanPan

Introduction

Features

Quick Start

Installation

Windows

Binary Package

Chocolatey

Scoop

Code Signing Policy

Linux

Snap

Flatpak

macOS

Docker

Other Platforms

Automation Related

VS Code

Sublime Text

Dependency

How To Compile

Happy Modelling

Licence