Portable, Extensible Toolkit for Scientific Computation (PETSc)

Hong Zhang (Illinois Institute of Technology and Argonne National Laboratory, USA.)

MSI Computational Mathematics Seminar Series

DATE: 2008-05-12
TIME: 11:00:00 - 12:00:00
LOCATION: John Dedman G35
CONTACT: JavaScript must be enabled to display this email address.

ABSTRACT:
Portable, Extensible Toolkit for Scientific Computation (PETSc) is a suite of data structures and routines for the scalable (parallel) solution of scientific applications modeled by partial differential equations. Over many years of research, the developers of PETSc have devised a powerful general-purpose infrastructure for the solution of sparse linear and non-linear systems arising from the discretization of PDEs. Due to its solid mathematical grounding, careful software design, and most importantly, evolution resulting from the usage of many users on various application areas, PETSc has had a major impact throughout the scientific and engineering computing community. As a PETSc developer, I will give an overview of the PETSc, and demonstrate its uses in algorithmic research, numerical production simulation and parallel performance evaluation. Using several examples, I will illustrate how to define and solve linear and nonlinear equations arising from the discretization of PDEs under PETSc environment. I will also present a list of our ongoing research developments, including a project on the parallel nonlinear implicit coupling solvers for a plasma simulation.
BIO:
http://www-unix.mcs.anl.gov/~hzhang/