[petsc-users] pcsetup

Barry Smith bsmith at petsc.dev
Tue Jul 21 20:28:34 CDT 2020


  Alex,

   See my long email.   The thing with nested preconditioners (like yours) is they have multiple PCSetUps(), possibly outer ones and inner ones. Each of these PC independently triggers a rebuild based on its own state, hence the inner PCSetUps will be triggered when you change the inner matrices (even when you don't call MatAssemblyBegin/End() on the MatNest. 

   In your case since the preconditioner seems to depend only on the two sub matrices the fact that PCSetUp() is not called on the MatNest is harmless, since that setup wouldn't do anything anyways. 

   For Schur complement based PCFieldsplits however the result maybe be wrong unless you call MatAssemblyBegin/End on the nest matrix since the outer setup actually does something

  Barry


> On Jul 21, 2020, at 8:16 PM, Alex Fleeter <luis.saturday at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> If I call MatAssembly for individual sub-matrices, 
>  MatAssemblyBegin(subA[ii], MAT_FINAL_ASSEMBLY);
>  MatAssemblyEnd(subA[ii], MAT_FINAL_ASSEMBLY);
> 
> then call KSPSetOperators, the PC setup is not called.
> 
> I have to call the assembly for the whole nest matrix 
>  MatAssemblyBegin(A, MAT_FINAL_ASSEMBLY);
>  MatAssemblyEnd(A, MAT_FINAL_ASSEMBLY);
> to trigger the setup of PC. 
> 
> I found some comments in matnest.c <https://www.mcs.anl.gov/petsc/petsc-current/src/mat/impls/nest/matnest.c>, line 474-478: "Note: split assembly will fail if the same block appears more than once (even indirectly through a nested
> 475:  <>           * sub-block). This could be fixed by adding a flag to Mat <https://www.mcs.anl.gov/petsc/petsc-current/docs/manualpages/Mat/Mat.html#Mat> so that there was a way to check if a Mat <https://www.mcs.anl.gov/petsc/petsc-current/docs/manualpages/Mat/Mat.html#Mat> was
> 476:  <>           * already performing an assembly, but the result would by more complicated and appears to offer less
> 477:  <>           * potential for diagnostics and correctness checking. Split assembly should be fixed once there is an
> 478:  <>           * interface for libraries to make asynchronous progress in "user-defined non-blocking collectives"."
> I guess the comment suggests calling matassembly for the big nest matrix after having setted values for individual sub-matrices, instead of calling matassembly for individual submatrices.
> 
> Can you confirm that?
> 
> 
> On Tue, Jul 21, 2020 at 4:35 PM Mark Adams <mfadams at lbl.gov <mailto:mfadams at lbl.gov>> wrote:
> KSPSetOperator tells the KSP that the PC should be resetup.
> 
> On Tue, Jul 21, 2020 at 3:45 PM Alex Fleeter <luis.saturday at gmail.com <mailto:luis.saturday at gmail.com>> wrote:
> Hi:
> 
> I want to ask under what circumstance will trigger a call for pc setup. 
> 
> I call KSPSolve to solve with the same Mat object with different entry values each time. I can see that the pc setup is only called at the beginning of the first solve. 
> 
> I tried to read the implementation, but quickly get lost...

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