dorsal team mailing list archive

[Fredrik Heffer Valdmanis <fredva@xxxxxxxxxx>]

>
> I am interested in this, but I am going to wait until after Dorsal is
>> thoroughly tested to build FEniCS 1.0.
>>
>> There are lot of other interesting things waiting to be merged too,
>> including support for Intel compilers and the ability to build other
>> FEMy projects like Deal.II and Dune. Everything in good time.
>>
>> Thanks. I was a bit unclear in my previous email, I wasn't hoping for a
> merge anytime soon. What I wanted to know is what you think about this way
> of doing it? Do you have any suggestions for improvements? It would be good
> for me to improve on the design so that it is more or less ready for
> merging when my Dolfin code gets released sometime in the distant future.
> If the timing is bad we can discuss it later, I just wanted to air my
> thoughts about it :)
>
> Garth, I see your point about the complications. That requires some
> thinking.
>

>
I think it might be a good time to bring this thread up again now. My
Dorsal branch is still working fine, but there are a couple of issues that
should be discussed before merging:

1: As mentioned in my first email, the user has to set "default
CUDA_DIR=<path to cuda installation>" in the platform file, and add the
packages cusp and thrust to the beginning of the list of packages to build
PETSc with Cusp support. This might not be the best way to solve this. One
could of course set CUDA_DIR in dorsal/local.cfg instead, but the list of
packages to install still has to be modified. Any opinions? Could this be
(semi) automated?

2: Thrust and Cusp only comes packaged in .zip-files, which Dorsal doesn't
support as far as I can see. To get around this this, {thrust,
cusp}.package currently pull the latest hg repositories from Google Code.
To make these development versions play nice with petsc-3.2-p6, I have had
to add a patch to PETSc. A possible solution would be to package stable
versions of cusp and thrust ourselves and host them on
fenicsproject.org. PETSc-dev
works fine with these development versions, so we can skip the patching
once 3.2-p7 is released.

My branch could be merged into Dorsal trunk anytime, but I am happy to make
changes if you have any suggestions for improvements.

It's still at lp:~fredva/dorsal/dorsal-gpu.

-- 
Fredrik