[petsc-users] human-readable examples and PETSc idioms

[Marco Zocca]

Thank you for the reply;

  let me improve my question: in e.g. a FEM code, we need:


*) a mesh table :: [element -> [face -> [edge -> [node] ] ] ]

*) one or more reference elements with associated basis over elements
and/or faces and Jacobians, or a quadrature rule to represent
integration over the real-space elements, for each element

*) one or more scalar/tensor coefficients per element


Assembly (in the simplest case) of the global matrix is then a single
loop over elements.


I would like to use the highest-level primitives for this task (I am
tackling a stochastic PDE-constrained optimization problem, so
complexity control and modularity is paramount ), could you provide
some hints ?

Thank you again and kind regards,
Marco






>>    I'm looking for some non-optimized PETSc code; namely, I struggle a
>> bit with generalizing the provided examples. On one hand inlined
>> elementary operations help keep track of the FLOPs but make for
>> hard-to read code.
>>

>
> You can use MatSetValuesStencil() as is done here:
>
> http://www.mcs.anl.gov/petsc/petsc-current/src/ksp/ksp/examples/tutorials/ex50.c.html
>
> on line 162.
>
>>

>> , removed comments for space) we are interested in forming a matrix A
>> from the values contained in a vector x; i.e. some 'map' operation
>> that sweeps x and prepares rows of A at a time according to some fixed
>> stencil, with separate treatment of boundary values .
>>
>> Isn't there an idiom to abstract out this functionality? It's one of
>> the most common operations in numerical PDE codes:
>
>
> Actually, this is only common is toy example. Almost no real PDEs have a
> fixed stencil
> because you have material coefficients, or nonlinearities, or constraints,
> etc.
>
>    Matt