[petsc-dev] PetscFEM routines missing user data arguments

[Geoffrey Irving]

On Thu, Nov 14, 2013 at 6:03 PM, Matthew Knepley <knepley at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 14, 2013 at 7:43 PM, Geoffrey Irving <irving at naml.us> wrote:
>>
>> It doesn't look like there's currently a way to pass user data down to
>> the various fields in PetscFEM.  Can I add an extra argument to each
>> function, or is that part of the API going to change in a way that
>> would obviate the extra argument?
>
>
> That is by design. Here is the rationale. I want to be able to use CUDA or OpenCL
> to evaluate these low-level FEM integration routines, so you can't pass in arbitrary context.
>
> I really don't think we should need arbitrary information at the lowest level integration.
> Right now you can pass in information using auxiliary fields. How would you use
> other stuff?

Well, you're probably not going to like application 1, which is
passing around PyObject*'s so I can write little FEM explorations in
numpy.  Is the field support the right thing to do for constant
fields, or integer valued constant fields?

Geoffrey