[petsc-dev] PetscSection

[Jed Brown]

On Sat, Nov 10, 2012 at 3:12 PM, Matthew Knepley <knepley at gmail.com> wrote:

> Yes, I agree completely with batching of this kind, which is why my
> integration
> functions look like they do. However, the topology information is not
> really needed
> in these kernels. Instead you are packing discretization information, like
> FEM coefficients, or geometric information like Jacobians, which are
> all controlled
> by PetscSection, not by the DMComplex.
>

At the time you call an element residual kernel, you definitely need that
information. Now the question is how much should bubble up to higher levels.

Because I think topological dimension is an important attribute (I think
the library should be able to distinguish tets from quads), I was only
proposing using topological dimension more explicitly. Karl suggests one
step further in delineating the specific topology. My concern with that is
keeping a contiguous index space. If there is sorting by cell topology, you
no longer have to store size explicitly for each point in the coneSection.
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