Copyright (c) 2016, Los Alamos National Security, LLC All rights reserved. LA-CC-04-010

MSTK is a mesh framework that allows users to represent, manipulate and query unstructured 3D arbitrary topology meshes in a general manner without the need to code their own data structures. MSTK is a flexible framework in that it allows a variety of underlying representations for the mesh while maintaining a common interface. It allows users to choose from different mesh representations either at initialization (implemented) or during the program execution (not yet implemented) so that the optimal data structures are used for the particular algorithm. The interaction of users and applications with MSTK is through a functional interface that acts as though the mesh always contains vertices, edges, faces and regions and maintains connectivity between all these entities.

MSTK allows for the simultaneous existence of an arbitrary number of meshes. However, any entity in MSTK can belong to only one mesh at a time. MSTK also allows applications to attach application or field data to entities. This data may be integers, reals and pointers.

MSTK supports distributed meshes for parallel computing. In the future it will allow for parallel mesh modification.

MSTK is not a mesh generator but the infrastructure it provides can be used to develop sophisticated mesh generators and other mesh based applications.

MSTK is not related in anyway to STK or STKmesh in the Trilinos suite of software products

I have tested MSTK only on Linux systems, on HPC Unix systems and on MacOS with GNU, PGI and Intel compilers. If it doesn't work on a particular system, please let me know. If you have a patch, feel free to submit a pull request.

MSTK is distributed as open-source software under a BSD 3-clause copyright agreement. Please see the full copyright statement in the COPYRIGHT file in this distribution

Starting from MSTK v1.8, we are including CMakeLists.txt files to allow users to build and install MSTK on a wide variety of platforms with various options enable/disabled easily. If you are unfamiliar with CMake, it is an open-source project configuration system developed by Kitware, Inc. (See http://www.cmake.org).

The following are the steps for build and installing MSTK using cmake

1. Verify that you have cmake or install it on your system (system-wide or locally)

2. Examine and Modify the file config/do-configure-mstk. This is the driver file for telling the build system what options are needed in the MSTK build. DO NOT HACK the CMakeLists.txt files. Try to control the build system behavior through the configure script. Using this script, you can turn on/off Exodus support, parallel mesh support, specify where to find third-party libraries, where to install the mstk libraries etc. The most up-to-date options for the configuration are given in the example configure script supplied with the distribution (config/do-configure-mstk).

3. Choose a build directory. This could be a subdirectory named build in the mstk source tree or some other directory. If you want to build both debug and optimized targets you have to run cmake and build in separate subdirectories or one build will clobber the other. I like to create subdirectories build/Debug and build/Release in the mstk directory and build the different versions there.

4. cd to the build directory and run the do-configure-mstk script there. This will create the appropriate Makefiles.

5. Then run 'make' followed by 'make install' or just run 'make install' right away. 'make VERBOSE=1' will display details about what compile commands make is using.

6. 'make install' not only installs the library and the include files but also a CMake configuration file called MSTKConfig.cmake. This file contains many important CMake variables used in building MSTK and can simplify the process of building an executable based on MSTK. See section C for more detail.

1. Read the manual ! It is included with the distribution. While it may not be the most up-to-date, it has the essentials
2. Browse MSTK.h

1. Include "MSTK.h" in any code that uses MSTK

2. Link with the MSTK libraries and any third party libraries that were used to build MSTK.

   To simplify the process of building an end application using MSTK, a CMake configuration file called MSTKConfig.cmake is written out when you 'make install' MSTK.

   The directory config/application_cmake contains a CMakeLists.txt file and a do-configure script to use as a "rough" template for developing a CMake based build system for an application using MSTK

Feel free to contact me if you need any assistance at rao@lanl.gov. If you are successfully using MSTK in your work, drop me a note.

Rao V Garimella, T-5, MS B284, Los Alamos National Laboratory
Los Alamos, NM 87544 USA
Tel: (505) 665-2928
Email: rao@lanl.gov
http://math.lanl.gov/~rao