dolfin team mailing list archive

[Jed Brown <fenics@xxxxxxxx>]

On Thu 2008-04-10 12:14, Ola Skavhaug wrote:
> To be able to tackle solvers through the Generic* interface, should we
> consider having a GenericSolver? Today, a LUSolver has a DefaultLUSolver, a
> typedef to either uBlasLUSolver or PETScLUSolver. Not clear to me what the
> best solution is...

I've been watching this discussion for a while and it seems to me that the
direction this is going is a duplication of the PETSc Mat/KSP/PC abstraction.
In my opinion, anything less would become frustrating down the line.  Of course,
if you don't want to always depend on PETSc, you have to duplicate the
abstraction.  This can be done in a more C++ native way, but it will end up
looking quite similar and being a fair amount of work.  It's not clear to me if
the reason to avoid a hard PETSc dependence is desire for a stronger direct
solver than the default, or that you really don't want users to need to install
it.  If it's the former, building with Umfpack seems like a decent solution.
The power of being able to try out different solvers on the command line is
extremely useful in my experience.

Jed