Freefem++

Fruit of a long maturing process, freefem, in its last avatar, FreeFem++, is a high level integrated development environment (IDE) for numerically solving partial differential equations (PDE). It is the ideal tool for teaching the finite element method but it is also perfect for research to quickly test new ideas or multi-physics and complex applications.
FreeFem++ has an advanced automatic mesh generator, capable of a posteriori mesh adaptation; it has a general purpose elliptic solver interfaced with fast algorithms such as the multi-frontal method UMFPACK, SuperLU . Hyperbolic and parabolic problems are solved by iterative algorithms prescribed by the user with the high level language of FreeFem++. It has several triangular finite elements, including discontinuous elements. Finally everything is there in FreeFem++ to prepare research quality reports: color display online with zooming and other features and postscript printouts.Contents
Introduction
Getting Started
Learning by Examples
Syntax
Mesh Generation
Finite Elements
Visualization
Algorithms
Mathematical Models
MPI Parallel version
Parallel sparse solvers
Mesh Files
Addition of a new finite element