[petsc-dev] Monitor changes

[Barry Smith]

On Aug 13, 2011, at 10:44 PM, Jed Brown wrote:

> On Sat, Aug 13, 2011 at 22:39, Barry Smith <bsmith at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:
> AMS could be ok. It doesn't care about structure.
> 
> The program has to expose the correct structure. Some fields are normally computed and thrown away, so they would have to be formalized a bit in order to snoop with AMS. The "help" strings are also not centralized like with options so it would be harder to explain what a parameter in -pc_view actually meant.
> 
> Should we make a "rich" viewer

    Not sure it is really a viewer? It is an AMS published memory (bunch of fields) for the object, not sure if it makes sense to consider that a subclass of PetscViewer

> that has the object, name, type, and help string for every piece of information being exposed?

   Yes, I think the only thing missing is the "help string" for each field.  For example currently it is

ierr = AMS_Memory_add_field(obj->amem,"its",&ksp->its,1,AMS_INT,AMS_READ,AMS_COMMON,AMS_REDUCT_UNDEF);CHKERRQ(ierr);

"its" is the help string. We could have a convention that the string is done as "variablename: useful message" for example  "its: the number of iterations the Krylov solver is currently at" then the GUI can process it anyway it wants.

  Barry


> Then we could "publish" this information for AMS and also optionally put it into a file or other viewer for anyone who wasn't using AMS to read that data?