[petsc-dev] Wrapper for WSMP

[Barry Smith]

On Aug 16, 2011, at 5:14 PM, Jack Poulson wrote:

> Hello all,
> 
> I am working on a project that requires very fast sparse direct solves and MUMPS and SuperLU_Dist haven't been cutting it. From what I've read, when properly tuned, WSMP is significantly faster, particularly with multiple right-hand sides on large machines. The obvious drawback is that it's not open source, but the binaries seem to be readily available for most platforms.
> 
> Before I reinvent the wheel, I would like to check if anyone has already done some work on adding it into PETSc. If not, its interface is quite similar to MUMPS and I should be able to mirror most of that code. On the other hand, there are a large number of platform-specific details that need to be handled, so keeping things both portable and fast might be a challenge. It seems that the CSC storage format should be used since it is required for Hermitian matrices.
> 
> Thanks,
> Jack

  Jack,

   By all means do it. That would be a nice thing to have. But be aware that the WSMP folks have a reputation for exaggerating how much better their software is so don't be surprised if after all that work it is not much better.

   BTW: are you solving with many right hand sides? Maybe before you muck with WSMP we should figure out how to get you access to the multiple right hand side support of MUMPS (I don't know if SuperLU_Dist has it) so you can speed up your current computations a good amount? Currently PETSc's MatMatSolve() calls a separate solve for each right hand side with MUMPS.

   Barry