[SciPy-dev] petsc - UMFPACK and scipy

[Ondrej Certik]

On 4/13/07, Robert Cimrman <cimrman3 at ntc.zcu.cz> wrote:
> Nils Wagner wrote:
> > Please can you show me an example where petsc solvers are "better" than
> > UMFPACK.
>
> Petsc is really a superpackage providing many parallel linear solvers
> (iterative, direct, preconditioners, ...) together with nonlinear
> solvers, time steppers, etc. The solvers can be both petsc-native or
> external packages, nevertheless all are accessed via a uniform
> interface. IMHO UMFPACK is one of the optional external solvers petsc
> can use, so to answer your question, petsc can do anything that UMFPACK
> does and much more.

Yes, it's exactly like this. Thus, there is a question whether SciPy
should support sparse solvers (my answer is yes) and if so, then it
should support petsc, otherwise, for example me, I am not going to use
it, as I want to try several solvers according to the problem.

What I am trying to say is that I don't want to write two versions of
my code - one for petsc and second one for SciPy. And from the zen of
python:

There should be one-- and preferably only one --obvious way to do it.

Ondra