First I should say that I'm not a neutral party as regards Elmer. In September 2003 I took responsibility for leading the group which has been developing Elmer for over ten years. So, I am not a developer of the system, but I do have a strong interest in making Elmer a success story.

The Elmer software is targeted to the professional who knows mathematical modeling and numerical methods. It is not suitable for a novice, at least without the guidance of an experienced colleague.

This Spring there will be a new manual for the Solver component, and the existing manuals will be updated. In addition, the developers have plans to go Open Source with the Solver component of Elmer during 2004.

Most of the software development effort (perhaps 90%) has been dedicated to the Solver component, plus solving numerous real-life applications.

The weakest part of Elmer is the graphical ElmerFront component, which is used for defining the geometry, physical properties, and the mathematical equations.

Currently the developers are searching for portable software which could replace or complement the existing graphical interface. This front-end software should be priced reasonably, and be made available for free to academic users. This is a difficult set of requirements.

Recently, Elmer has been boosted to include discontinuous Galerkin elements, automatic mesh refinement, and block preconditioners. In a few areas Elmer has no competitors, and with these new techniques the system can solve large real-life problems even on desktop systems.

So far Elmer has mainly been used for consulting services in multi-physical problems. By going open source the developers hope to get yet additional functionality to the modeling capabilities of the system.