[petsc-dev] Current status: GPUs for PETSc

[Karl Rupp]

Hi Matt,

 >         I guess effectively we'd like something like
>         MatCreateSeqAIJWithArrays and
>         MatCreateMPIAIJWithSplitArrays but with the ability to pass
>         device pointers
>         rather than host pointers.  Is there any roadmap in PETSc for
>         this kind of
>         thing?  Would patches in this direction be welcome?
>
>
>     Type safety is a bit nasty. CUDA allows to deal with plain 'void *',
>     while OpenCL expects cl_mem. This suggests to use something like
>        MatCreateSeqAIJWithCUDAArrays(__),
>        MatCreateSeqAIJWithOpenCLArray__s(),
>     but as I said above, I haven't come to a decision on that yet.
>
>
> Let me be more specific. I would not support this. I think it is wrong.
>
> You should create the Mat in the normal way and then pull out the backend
> storage. This way we have one simple interface for creation and
> preallocation,
> and eventually we make a nicer FEM interface to cover up the device pointer
> extraction.
>

Thanks for the input, I also prefer the 'one simple interface' approach.

Best regards,
Karli