[petsc-users] Scatter parallel Vec to sequential Vec on non-zeroth process

[Jed Brown]

Peder Jørgensgaard Olesen <pjool at mek.dtu.dk> writes:

> Each process is assigned an indexed subset of the tasks (the tasks are of constant size), and, for each task index, the relevant data is scattered as a SEQVEC to the process (this is done for all processes in each step, using an adaption of the code in Matt's link). This way each process only receives just the data it needs to complete the task. While I'm currently working with very moderate size data sets I'll eventually need to handle something rather more massive, so I want to economize memory where possible and give each process only the data it needs.

>From the sounds of it, this pattern ultimately boils down to MPI_Gather being called P times where P is the size of the communicator. This will work okay when P is small, but it's much less efficient than calling MPI_Alltoall (or MPI_Alltoallv), which you can do by creating one PetscSF that ships the needed data to each task and PETSCSF_PATTERN_ALLTOALL. You can see an example.

https://gitlab.com/petsc/petsc/-/blob/main/src/vec/is/sf/tests/ex3.c#L93-151