A Gentle Introduction to PETSc
PETSc is an MPI-based scalable solver library that provides a wide variety of sparse linear solvers, nonlinear solvers, time integrators, and optimization algorithms. Since solver needs are application-specific and simple black-box interfaces are rarely appropriate, the PETSc design focuses on the composability of algorithms and this composability representation in software, thus allowing users to construct the most appropriate particular solver for their problem(s) from a smallish set of building blocks. In addition, PETSc provides abstractions that map from the natural discretization language of the numerical problem to the algebraic structures the solvers need, thus removing some of the tedium of providing this mapping manually. The presentation will provide some history of PETSc, how the software and community are organized, some of the challenges going forward, as well as a discussion of algorithm composability and discretization-based interfaces to solvers.
If you would like to attend, please email crampersad@flatironinstitute.org for the Zoom details.