[petsc-users] PETSc and dense matrices

[Raeth, Peter]

Am only myself just learning PETSc. But, I have used it to compute the Kronecker Tensor Product  K = A ! B where K and A are distributed. Someone with more experience may have different answers.

BEM produces a dense LHS matrix that needs to be solved.

While I can not put my finger on it, I thought I saw on a man page that PETSc was only designed for the solution of sparse matrices.

Can I use PETSc to build/populate my LHS matrix on different nodes
of a cluster (as opposed to constructing it on a single node and then
distributing it) ?

This is something I do all the time. I find what part of a matrix is co-located with the process and then have the process operate on that part of the matrix. This can come down to matrix initialization.



Best,

Peter.


Peter G. Raeth, Ph.D.
Senior Staff Scientist
Signal and Image Processing
High Performance Technologies, Inc
937-904-5147
praeth at hpti.com

________________________________________
From: petsc-users-bounces at mcs.anl.gov [petsc-users-bounces at mcs.anl.gov] on behalf of Hamid M. [spam.wax at gmail.com]
Sent: Thursday, January 06, 2011 12:46 PM
To: petsc-users at mcs.anl.gov
Subject: [petsc-users] PETSc and dense matrices

Hello,

In our research, we solve the diffusion equation PDE using Boundary
Element Method (BEM).
I am trying to parallelize the code we already have and I was
wondering if PETSc is the right tool for us.

As you know, BEM produces a dense LHS matrix that needs to be solved.
Also due to the size of our problems, populating the entities of the
LHS matrix needs to be done on different processes as it won't fit on
a single process of our cluster.

So I was wondering if you guys can answer my questions:

1- Can I use PETSc to build/populate my LHS matrix on different nodes
of a cluster (as opposed to constructing it on a single node and then
distributing it) ?

2- Are there optimized parallel solvers for dense matrices in PETSc ?

3- If the answer to question 1 is 'No', can I build my LHS matrix
independent of PETSc and then direct PETSc to solve it for me ?

thanks in advance,

Hamid