Hermes is a C++ library for rapid prototyping of space- and space-time adaptive hp-FEM solvers. Novel PDE-independent hp-adaptivity algorithms allow you to solve a large variety of PDE problems ranging from stationary linear equations to complex time-dependent nonlinear multiphysics PDE systems (see videos). The library is developed in collaboration with CSE experts, it follows newest trends in software engineering, and it comes with a free interactive online lab powered by UNR computing facilities. Detailed tutorial enhanced with many benchmarks and examples allow you to use Hermes without being expert in object-oriented programming, finite element methods, or in the theory of partial differential equations. Plus, there is a very active user community where you will get help quickly.

Hermes is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with Hermes; If not, write to the Free Software Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin Street, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301, USA.

Copyright (c) 2009 hp-FEM group at the University of Nevada, Reno (UNR). Email: hpfem@unr.edu, home page: http://hpfem.org/.

Installation instructions for Linux, Mac OS X, Windows Cygwin, and Windows MSVC can be found in the Sphinx documentation at http://hpfem.org/hermes/doc/index.html.

Source files of the (Sphinx) user documentation are in the directory doc/. In order to compile the user documentation, you need to install Sphinx. Then follow these steps:

cd doc make html firefox _build/html

This is a sequence of steps which will install Sphinx and which will allow to generate user documentation. The steps assume that you have already installed Microsoft Visual Studio 9 (MSVC) Express Edition (or any higher edition) and you have a copy of Hermes sources.

All commands, which are marked with a keyword 'prompt:', are executed in a command prompt opened in the step 3. Search for all mentioned application through Google since, usually, the first link is the right one.

1. Download and install python 2.6
2. Add paths 'my_python_path' and 'my_python_pathScripts' to the enviromental variable PATH.
3. Open a command prompt with MSVC variables: Search for 'Visual Studio 2008 Command Prompt' in the start menu.
4. Download and install setuptools 0.6c11
5. Install Sphinx using setuptools (Internet access required) prompt: easy_install -U Sphinx
6. Go to a folder doc folder of Hermes source tree prompt: cd my_hermesdoc
7. Run NMAKE requesting HTML version prompt: nmake html
8. View the documentation using a file 'my_hermes2ddoc_buildindex.html'

Source files of the (Doxygen) developer documentation are kept in the directories hermes1d/doc.cpp, hermes2d/doc.cpp and hermes3d/doc.cpp. In order to build them you need to install Doxygen. If you are in hermesXd/, do:;

cd doc.cpp/ doxygen hermesXd.lib-real.doxyfile doxygen hermesXd.lib-cplx.doxyfile

This will generate documentation for the real and complex version of the library, respectively. To view the docs, type:

firefox hXd-real/html/index.html
firefox hXd-cplx/html/index.html