[Gmsh] General Question

[Timmy Schumacher]

Sorry, I know this is a little off topic, but I thought most people on this
list would be able to give me some insight.  So, my question is about
assembling the stiffness matrix for a finite element calculation.  In
general, you don't know how many non-zero entries there are, and you don't
know in advance the locations of the non-zeros.  So I wrote a dynamically
growing sparse matrix class using linked lists which I convert to efficient
storage before doing any calculations.  So my question is: Is there some
better/faster/more efficient way to go about this, like some way to know the
locations of the non-zeros ahead of time?

Thanks!
Tim