ESFM: An Essential Software Framework for Meshfree Methods

•ESFM, an object-oriented software framework for meshfree methods, is described.•Using few ESFM components can yield 48 variations of meshfree methods.•ESFM enables exploring meshfree method implementations such as data structures and algorithms.•Using ESFM, researchers can develop new meshfree methods with much less effort.•ESFM is an ideal platform for future research on meshfree methods.

This paper describes an Essential Software Framework for Meshfree Methods (ESFM). Through thorough analyses of many existing meshfree methods, their common elements and procedures are identified, and a general procedure is formulated into ESFM that can facilitate their implementations and accelerate new developments in meshfree methods. ESFM also modulates performance-critical components such as neighbor-point searching, sparse-matrix storage, and sparse-matrix solver enabling developed meshfree analysis programs to achieve high-performance. ESFM currently consists of 21 groups of classes and 94 subclasses, and more algorithms can be easily incorporated into ESFM. Finally, ESFM provides a common ground to compare various meshfree methods, enabling detailed analyses of performance characteristics.