FIDISOL: A ‘black box’ solver for partial differential equations

FIDISOL (finite difference solver) is a program package for the solution of nonlinear systems of 2-D and 3-D elliptic and parabolic partial differential equations subjected to arbitrary nonlinear boundary conditions on a rectangular domain. The solution method is a variable step size/variable order finite difference method. This paper is a survey of this project in which the principles of developing a fully vectorized program package designed as a ‘data flow’ algorithm for vector computers are explicated.