[petsc-users] How to use DM_BOUNDARY_GHOSTED for Dirichlet boundary conditions

[Barry Smith]

Paul,

DM_BOUNDARY_GHOSTED  would result in the extra ghost locations in the local vectors (obtained with DMCreateLocalVector() but they will not appear in the global vectors obtained with DMCreateGlobalVector(); perhaps this is the issue? Since they do not appear in the global vector they will not appear in the linear system so there will be no diagonal entries for you to set since those rows/columns do not exist in the linear system.  In other words, using DM_BOUNDARY_GHOSTED is a way to avoid needing to put the Dirichlet values explicitly into the system being solved; DM_BOUNDARY_GHOSTED is generally more helpful for nonlinear systems than linear systems.

Barry

> On Feb 27, 2023, at 12:08 PM, Paul Grosse-Bley <paul.grosse-bley at ziti.uni-heidelberg.de> wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> I would like to modify src/ksp/ksp/tutorials/ex45.c to implement Dirichlet boundary conditions using DM_BOUNDARY_GHOSTED instead of using DM_BOUNDARY_NONE and explicitly implementing the boundary by adding diagnonal-only rows.
> 
> My assumption was that with DM_BOUNDARY_GHOSTED all vectors from that DM have the extra memory for the ghost entries and that I can basically use DMDAGetGhostCorners instead of DMDAGetCorners to access the array gotten via DMDAVecGetArray. But when I access (gxs, gys, gzs) = (-1,-1,-1) I get a segmentation fault. When looking at the implementation of DMDAVecGetArray it looked to me as if accessing (-1, -1, -1) should work as DMDAVecGetArray passes the ghost corners to VecGetArray3d which then adds the right offsets.
> 
> I could not find any example using DM_BOUNDARY_GHOSTED and then actually accessing the ghost/boundary elements. Can I assume that they are set to zero for the solution vector, i.e. the u=0 on \del\Omega and I do not need to access them at all?
> 
> Best,
> Paul Große-Bley