[[TableOfContents]]

= History & overview =
Initially, this project started as a rewrite in Fortran 90 of the [http://www.amath.washington.edu/~claw/ CLAWPACK] (Randy !LeVeque) and AMRCLAW (Randy !LeVeque and Marsha Berger) codes. BEARCLAW still exhibits a strong resemblance to CLAWPACK in some respects, especially in the definition of user modules. The internals are quite different though. The basic framework is to apply some action on grids organized hierarchically as a forest of trees. Highlights of the code include:

 * Distributed memory parallelization
 * Multigrid implementation to solve linear and nonlinear systems arising from parabolic and elliptic terms
 * Multiphysics - the code can solve multiple physical laws simultaneously
 * Multinumerics - different numerical schemes can be applied simultaneously
 * Adaptive physics and numerics - different physical laws, numerical schemes can be activated at different resolution levels
 * Data output in CLAWPACK, HDF4, HDF5, Tecplot formats
 * Visualization scripts for Matlab (from CLAWPACK), OpenDX, Maya''''''Vi
The package includes a large number of examples and applications. Here are some of the PDEs solved:

 * advection
 * linear and nonlinear acoustics
 * Burgers equation
 * shallow water equations
 * Euler equations
 * Navier-Stokes equations (incompressible, stratified, compressible)
 * Stokes equations
 * elasticity
 * viscoelasticity
 * MHD
= Using BEARCLAW =
== What you should already know ==
 * Prerequisites: Fortran 95/2003, Un*x (try [http://www.opensuse.org/ openSUSE] and [http://www.xubuntu.org Xubuntu])
 * Good to know:  [http://python.org Python], Wiki culture ([http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/MoinMoinWiki MoinMoin])
 * If you want to see results: [http://www.opendx.org/ OpenDX], [http://www.mathworks.com/products/matlab/ Matlab], [http://mayavi.sourceforge.net/ Mayavi], [http://hdf.ncsa.uiuc.edu/ HDF]
 * If you want to solve big problems: [http://www.lam-mpi.org/ MPI]
== Documentation ==
|| ''Quick Tours'' || ["The BEARCLAW appliance"] || ["Fast results"] || ["A gentle tutorial"] || ["How things work"] || ["What can it do?"] ||
|| ''Day Trips'' || ["Installing BEARCLAW"] || ["Conics and friends"] || ["Numerics"] || ["Physics"] || ["Adaptivity"] ||
|| ''Weekends with BEARCLAW'' ||["Installing support libraries"] || ["Boundary conditions"] || ["Customized I/O"] || ["Controlling adaptivity"] || ["Interleaving computations"] ||
|| ''I've got this really complicated problem ...'' ||["Geometry support packages"] || ["Multiphysics"] || ["Multinumerics"] || ["Moving meshes"] || ["Embedded boundaries"] ||
|| ''I've got this really big problem ...'' ||["Installing MPI"] || ["make mpibear"] ||["Speedup, what speedup?"] || ["I want to be parallel too ..."] || ["Shared memory"] ||
|| ''I've got this urge to change things ...'' ||["Customizing a BEARCLAW distribution"] || ["Writing a library module"] || ["The make process"] || ["Multiobject trees"] || ["Workflow automation"] ||

= Showcase =
|| ''Basic capabilities'' || ["AMR in action"] || ["Flow in a box"] || ["Squares and triangles"] ||
|| ''Single physics'' || ["Fluid flow"] || ["Elasticity"] || ["Viscoelasticity"] ||
|| ''Multiphysics'' || ["Fluids and structures"] || ["Rupture"] || ["Subgrid models"] ||

= Examples =
A large number of examples are available. Browse the svn repository at [http://coanda.amath.unc.edu/trac_projects/bearclaw/browser/examples]