Current trends in the software development for Partial Differential Equations, and here in particular for Finite Element (FEM) approaches, go clearly towards object--oriented techniques and adaptive methods in any sense.
Hereby the employed data and solver structures, and especially the matrix structures, are often in contradiction to modern hardware platforms. As a result, the observed computational efficiency is far away from expected peak rates of almost 4 GFLOP/s nowadays, and the `real life` gap will even further increase. So special techniques are necessary to come closer to peak performance. Some of these techniques and their realization within the FEM package FEAST are discussed.