MA62 ---a frontal code for sparse positive-definite symmetric systems from finite-element applications. We describe the design, implementation, and performance of a frontal code for the solution of large sparse symmetric systems of linear finite-element equations. The code is intended primarily for positive-definite systems since numerical pivoting is not performed. The resulting software package, MA62, will be included in Release 13 of the Harwell Subroutine Library (HSL). We illustrate the performance of our new code on a range of problems arising from real engineering and industrial applications. The performance of the code is compared with that of the HSL general frontal solver MA42 and with other positive-definite codes from the Harwell Subroutine Library. Keywords: sparse symmetric linear equations, symmetric frontal method, Gaussian elimination, finite-element equations, Level 3 BLAS. AMS(MSC 1991)