Some basic questions about PETSC

[Satish Balay]

On Sun, 3 Dec 2006, Matthew Knepley wrote:

> > 1. Are petscscaler the same as real nos.? I am writing in double precision
> > or real(8). So are these 2 interchangeable? (same as petscint and integer).
> 
> Yes.

You can check these defines in include/finclude/petscdef.h

PetscInt -> integer*4
PetscScalar -> real*8

> 
> > 2. while linking in compaq visual fortran, I get the warning message about
> > conflict library with LIBCMT. Is it important or can I just ignore it?
> 
> This is determined by your configure. Satish will know better how to control
> it.

There are some warnings because of the way compqaq f90 tries to
workarround some bugs in Visual Studio 6 version of the libraries. It
will be fine as long as all code [PETSc & application] is compiled
with the same set of compiler options,

> 
> > 3. I am writing in f90 free form format. When I modify from fixed f77 format
> > to f90, it gives me a lot of error, which seems to be the include file
> > error. So, is it possible to write in f90 format?
> 
> Depending on which compiler you use, you might have to give a flag. For g95
> it is -ffree-form.

We'll have to see the error messgaes to determine what the problem is
- however - if you check the PETSc fortran examples - they comply with
both fixed and free from syntax.

> > 4. I am writing a Navier stokes solver and I'm using PETSC to solve the
> > poisson eqn. If only the RHS changes with each time step, do I need to call
> > 
> > VecCreateSeq
> > <insert values in RHS b>
> > VecAssemblyBegin
> > VecAssemblyEnd
> > VecDestroy
> > 
> > at each time step? I don't think I can (or I should) change values of b
> > after VecAssemblyBegin,VecAssemblyEnd, or can I?
> 
> You can just change the values. Call AssemblyBegin/End() after each group
> of changes.

Another note: - If you change values with VecSetValues() - you'll need
to call VecAssemblyBegin,VecAssemblyEnd. However if you do
VecGetArray() [or VecGetArrayF0()] - and change values - then you
don't need the calls to VecAssembly...

Satish