[petsc-dev] Julia Petsc Wrapper

[Matthew Knepley]

On Mon, Jul 6, 2015 at 8:40 AM, Patrick Sanan <patrick.sanan at gmail.com>
wrote:
>
> On Mon, Jul 6, 2015 at 3:02 PM, Matthew Knepley <knepley at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> On Mon, Jul 6, 2015 at 4:59 AM, Patrick Sanan <patrick.sanan at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> I had a couple of brief discussions about this at Juliacon as well. I
>>> think it would be useful, but there are a couple of things to think about
>>> from the start of any new attempt to do this:
>>> 1. As Jack pointed out, one issue is that the PETSc library must be
>>> compiled for a particular precision. This raises some questions - should
>>> several versions of the library be built to allow for flexibility?
>>> 2. An issue with wrapping PETSc is always that the flexibility of using
>>> the PETSc options paradigm is reduced - how can this be addressed?
>>> Could/should an expert user be able to access the options database
>>> directly, or would this be too much violence to the wrapper abstraction?
>>>
>>
>> I have never understood why this is an issue. Can't you just wrap our
>> interface level, and use the options just as we do? That
>> is essentially what petsc4py does. What is limiting in this methodology?
>>
> I don't see any fundamental problems with this, either, but in practice
> people tend to want to hardcode things (like the deal.ii interface does, in
> my limited experience with it). Hopefully this is just a suboptimal design
> choice which can be avoided with an interface to the options database
> included in the wrapper.
>

The deal.II wrapper is crazy. I have told Wolfgang. It makes the same
mistake as FEniCS, which is to provide
an interface type for each PETSc implementation type. This kind of
confusion takes a flexible, runtime configuration
and makes it an inflexible, compile-time configuration while introducing a
load of new types and making the
closed-world assumption.

On the other hand, requiring specific types, ala FEniCS,
>> is very limiting.
>>
> What tradeoffs does FEniCS make in this context? Are there other wrappers
> which make different ones?
> How wrong is it to say "If we have real and complex double types, 99% of
> the use cases are covered?".
>

I think this is essentially true, and is what is done by the Purdue guys.
You can accomplish it by using dynamic
libraries and a fair bit of hacking. C still does not have a great way to
do this, but I am hopeful for the Karl-style
type handling from GPUs migrated to handle the real/complex divide.

   Matt


>
>
>>
>>    Matt
>>
>>
>>> On Sat, Jul 4, 2015 at 11:00 PM, Jared Crean <jcrean01 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>>  Hello,
>>>>      I am a graduate student working on a CFD code written in Julia,
>>>> and I am interested in using Petsc as a linear solver (and possibly for the
>>>> non-linear solves as well) for the code.  I discovered the Julia wrapper
>>>> file Petsc.jl in Petsc and have updated it to work with the current version
>>>> of Julia and the MPI.jl package, using only MPI for communication (I don't
>>>> think Julia's internal parallelism will scale well enough, at least not in
>>>> the near future).
>>>>
>>>>      I read the discussion on Github [
>>>> https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/2645], and it looks like
>>>> there currently is not a complete package to access Petsc from Julia.
>>>> With your permission, I would like to use the Petsc.jl file as the basis
>>>> for developing a package.  My plan is create a lower level interface that
>>>> exactly wraps Petsc functions, and then construct a higher level interface,
>>>> probably an object that is a subtype of Julia's AbstractArray, that allows
>>>> users to store values into Petsc vectors and matrices.  I am less
>>>> interested in integrating tightly with Julia's existing linear algebra
>>>> capabilities than ensuring good scalability.  The purpose of the high level
>>>> interface it simple to populate the vector or matrix.
>>>>
>>>>      What do you think, both about using the Petsc.jl file and the
>>>> overall approach?
>>>>
>>>>      Jared Crean
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> 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
>>
>
>


-- 
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
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.mcs.anl.gov/pipermail/petsc-dev/attachments/20150706/a4d7321f/attachment.html>