[petsc-dev] Proposed changes to TS API

[Smith, Barry F.]

> On May 11, 2018, at 3:38 PM, Matthew Knepley <knepley at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Fri, May 11, 2018 at 4:36 PM, Jed Brown <jed at jedbrown.org> wrote:
> "Zhang, Hong" <hongzhang at anl.gov> writes:
> 
> > We are not forcing users to do two matrix assemblies per time
> > step. For most cases, there is even no need to update dF/dUdot at
> > all. For extreme cases that the application requires frequent update
> > on dF/dUdot and assembly is expensive, one can always assemble the
> > single-matrix Jacobian and throw it to SNES directly.
> 
> For the vast majority of cases, the mass matrix terms are inexpensive
> and can be summed during each assembly at negligible cost (cheaper than
> accessing those terms from an already-assembled matrix).
> 
> >
> > TS used to be an unusable pile of crap until Jed proposed the marvelous
> > IJacobian interface. Suddenly COMPLEX fully-implicit DAE problems become
> > SIMPLE to express, and a single IFunction/IJacobian pair reusable for
> > different timestepper implementations a reality. And we got an added
> > bounus: this was efficient, it involved a SINGLE global matrix assembly. If
> > the issue is in supporting simpler problems, then we should go for an
> > alternative interface with broken Jacobians, just as Stefano propossed in a
> > previous email. I'm totally in favor of an additional broken Jacobians API,
> > and totally againt the removal of the single-matrix IJacobian interface.
> >
> > The current IJacobian is essentially SNESJacobian. And the single-matrix SNESJacobian interface is always there. Power users could set up the SNESJacobian directly if we pass a read-only shift parameter to them. So we are by no means prohibiting power users from doing what they want.
> 
> You mean the user would call TSGetSNES and SNESSetJacobian, then
> internally call TSGetIJacobianShift and some new function to create
> Udot?  That sounds way messier and error-prone.
> 
> And completely impossible to compose. We should be explicitly talking about subsystems that use TS. For example,
> I have a nonlinear system for plasticity. I want to use a preconditioner that introduces some elasticity and timesteps to
> steady state to provide a good Newton direction. I need to to be able to create the solver without all sorts of digging
> in and setting things. This idea that you "just set SNESJacobian" is a non-starter.

   But this is exactly what TSComputeIJacobian currently does, so is the current interface a non-starter?

> 
>   Matt
>  
> 
> > IJacobian with shift mixes TS Jacobian and SNES Jacobian. This is the issue we need to fix.
> 
> It is just one interface producing exactly the matrix that the solver
> needs.
> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> 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
> 
> https://www.cse.buffalo.edu/~knepley/