ABSTRACT: The Portable, Extensible Toolkit for Scientific Computation (PETSc) is a suite of data structures and routines for the scalable (parallel) solution of scientific problems arising from the discretization of PDEs. Mainly, it is a powerful general-purpose infrastructure for the solution of sparse linear and non-linear systems.
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.
The talk will give an overview of the PETSc library, and demonstrate its uses in algorithmic research, numerical production simulation and parallel performance evaluation, using applications as examples. Especially, it will illustrate how to define and use the main needed objects under the PETSc environment, highlighting their potential. At the end of the talk, we will discuss the ongoing work to drive PETSc to the near or more distant future.