FEAST (Finite Element Analysis & Solutions Tools) is a Finite Element
based solver toolkit for the simulation of PDE problems on parallel HPC
systems which implements the concept of `hardware-oriented numerics`, a
holistic approach aiming at optimal performance for modern numerics. In
this paper, we describe this concept and the modular design which
enables applications built on top of FEAST to execute efficiently,
without any code modifications, on commodity based clusters, the NEC SX
8 and GPU-accelerated clusters. We demonstrate good performance and weak
and strong scalability for the prototypical Poisson problem and more
challenging applications from solid mechanics and fluid
dynamics.