[petsc-dev] programming model for PETSc

[Matthew Knepley]

On Thu, Nov 24, 2011 at 5:09 PM, Jed Brown <jedbrown at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:

> On Thu, Nov 24, 2011 at 17:00, Matthew Knepley <knepley at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Next, I think we need example problems, as I said before. DM ex1 does
>> mesh distribution, which I think should also include
>> distribution of data over the mesh. I think we should add AMG, and FMM.
>> With these three examples, we can prove this system
>> is worthwhile. Any discussion of these examples, or other suggestions?
>>
>
> Mark also wants some sort of AMR (with or without load balancing). Can we
> make the specification small enough and concrete enough that we can write
> implementations in a small number of lines of code for proof-of-concept
> evaluation?
>

Okay, these need documentation. I will start with mesh distribution and you
guys can tell me what sucks.


> In the ideal case, we would have multiple proposals for parallel
> primitives and implement the test cases with each to compare expressiveness
> and the performance potential, but that will only happen if the spec is
> very simple. For this purpose, instead of the full test cases, could we
> just identify one or two communication patterns that are representative of
> each application and ask for an implementation of that. These could take
> the form "I have some information distributed as ... and I have a
> representation of the communication I want as ...". And this is starting to
> look a lot like VecScatterCreate(), albeit perhaps with different data
> types.
>

Of course the operations will always boil down to something simple, but I
do not believe anything that does not come
from a practical problem (too easy to cheat, read any CS journal). So first
problem specification, then representative
algorithm, then computational primitives.

    Matt

-- 
What most experimenters take for granted before they begin their
experiments is infinitely more interesting than any results to which their
experiments lead.
-- Norbert Wiener
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