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Re: Redesign almost finished

 



Johan Hake wrote:
On Friday 31 October 2008 09:38:38 Anders Logg wrote:
On Fri, Oct 31, 2008 at 07:57:52AM +0000, Garth N. Wells wrote:
Martin Sandve Alnæs wrote:
2008/10/30 Johan Hake <hake@xxxxxxxxx>:
On Thursday 30 October 2008 19:20:06 Anders Logg wrote:
Most things are now in place, finally. At least we can run the
Poisson demo again... :-)

Anyway, take a look at demo/pde/poisson/main.cpp and see what you
think. I think it looks pretty good, but please report if you have
any ideas for further improvements of the interface while we're at
it.
It looks nice, but I see some magic which I wish you can shed some
light on.

The introduction of PoissionFunctionSpace is not clear for me. Why do
we have to instantiate the forms with it?
Such that the Forms can use the same FunctionSpaces as are used in the
rest of the code, while the user stays in control of their allocation.
In particular, DofMaps needs to be shared between different parts of
the code.
In general the function spaces are named

  PoissonBilinearFormArgumentSpace0
  PoissonBilinearFormArgumentSpace1

  PoissonBilinearFormCoefficientSpace0
  PoissonBilinearFormCoefficientSpace1
  PoissonBilinearFormCoefficientSpace2
  PoissonBilinearFormCoefficientSpace3
  ...

Then, if all forms appearing in a form file (both a and L) share the
same test space (which is natural), then an additional space will be
generated:

  PoissonTestSpace

Same for the trial space:

  PoissonTrialSpace

If all spaces in the form are the same, then a common space will be
generated:

  PoissonFunctionSpace

As noted by Martin, this allows a user to control the level of reuse
of function spaces.

Ok.

In the form file the two forms L and a are defined. These are then
reflected in the main.cpp file as before. This is intuitive. But where
does the PoissonFunctionSpace come from? I as a user has not defined
it in the form file.

It might help if we introduce the notion of FunctionSpace in FFC/UFL.
Then some of the magic would disapear I think.
This could reinforce the problem with circular dependencies I mentioned
earlier. I don't see that anyone has adressed that issue.

The talk about a Function always knowing its Space was clear, you can
always plot it, and so on. But then the introduction of the "magic"
dedication of FunctionSpace broke that, and also made the actuall
function of FunctionSpace more blurry.

Intuitively I would prefer:

 ...
 PoissonFunctionSpace V(mesh);

 Source f(V);
 Flux g(V);
The problem here is that f and g may come from a space other than V. The
difficulty for a user is that it's hard (and error prone) to create the
FunctionSpaces and associate them with the right Functions.

Won't
   PoissonBilinearForm a(V,V);
   PoissonLinearForm L(V);

be as error prone with different test and trial spaces too?


No, because there are never more that two, we can use the meaningful names "Test" and "Trial" and they are always the first arguments to the Form constructor.

A possible solution along these lines was discussed last week which involved giving PoissonBilinearFormCoefficientSpace1, etc, names which involved the name used in the FFC input.

Garth

Garth

 PoissonBilinearForm a();
 PoissonLinearForm L();

 L.set_f(f); L.set_g(g);
 ...

If this is not possible or if it is but we do not want it, please
inform me.
We would still need

  PoissonBilinearForm a(V,V);
  PoissonLinearForm L(V);

Which looks, I agree, a bit misleading since you cannot
pass any other function spaces to these forms.
Yes, it's misleading. We could possibly modify the code generation to
something like

  PoissonBilinearForm a(mesh);
  PoissonLinearForm a(mesh);

and then create the test and trial space with the mesh? Won't it be difficult to share the dofmaps with other parts of the code then?

I think I thought it was strange because I have taken the dofmaps (or function space if you like) for the trial and test space for granted. With the new design this is more explicit and good.

and let the forms themselves create the right function space. The problem
then is that it will complicate reuse of function spaces.

The same thing goes for initialization of Functions with or without V.
Johan asks above about initialization of Functions with V:

  Source f(V);
  Flux g(V);

This is indeed possible and will lead to a reuse of V also for f and g.
What happens when one does

  a.f = f;

is that a check is made whether f has a function space and if not a
FunctionSpace is created and attached to f. So if one has already done
f(V), that space will be reused.

Good!


Johan
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