[petsc-dev] MatLoad for HDF5/MAT files

[Hapla Vaclav]

Hello

I would like to advertise pull request #1232 which brings the HDF5 matrix loader, done by Marek Pecha and me.
https://bitbucket.org/petsc/petsc/pull-requests/1232/

Its impact is twofold:
1) It introduces a truly parallel reader where each rank reads its chunk of the matrix.
2) It can directly read MATLAB's native MAT-file format (version 7.3) which is in fact an HDF5 flavor.

I updated MatLoad() documentation accordingly in
https://bitbucket.org/petsc/petsc/commits/29166e0

There are still some TODOs for future including
- MatView() implementation
- support for MATBAIJ, MATSBAIJ, MATDENSE
- support for complex numbers - MATLAB stores them in a different way than PETSc - this could be resolved by introducing two different PetscViewerFormats
- support for 64-bit integers
- automatically transpose objects if user wants (could be use also for MATLAB engine interface)

I would be grateful for any comments on the proposed feature, and particularly the documentation update (I guess this manual page is viewed pretty often by users), also from people outside PETSc core team.

Thanks

Vaclav