[petsc-dev] PetscSF vs VecScatter

[Barry Smith]

  Blaise,

   VecScatter will always be there as a way to arrange moving vector entries around between vectors.

   Someday (I bet Jed thought it would be years ago) PetscSF might be so good that VecScatter would be completely implemented on top of PetscSF and the old VecScatter implementations removed but that is only behind the scenes and not visible to users anyway.

   Does that sound reasonable or for some reason do you think the VecScatter API should be dropped and we force people who need to do vector scatters to do them by calling the PetscSF themselves?

   Barry

> On May 21, 2015, at 3:16 PM, Blaise A Bourdin <bourdin at lsu.edu> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> What is PETSc’s vision for VecScatter and PetscSF?
> 
> It seems that the only thing that prevents PetscSF from completely replacing VecScatter right now is that it does not support operations (ADD_VALUES, INSERT_VALUES). Is this an inherent restriction to SF that will force it to coexists with VecScatter, or is there a plan to add support for operations and gradually replace VecScatter with PetscSF?
> 
> Regards,
> Blaise
> 
> 
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> 
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