Virtual LANS Seminar

Seminar Title: Past, Current, and Future Topics with PETSc: Pipelined, Flexible Krylov Methods; Staggered Grid Abstractions; and Ideas for Community Engagement
Speaker: Patrick Sanan, Postdoctoral Researcher, ETH Zurich

Date/Time: November 25, 2020 / 10:30 AM – 11:30 AM
Location: See meeting URL on the cels-seminars website (requires Argonne login)

Description: I touch on three topics related to the PETSc library:

First, previous work on pipelined, flexible Krylov methods. These are variants of communication-hiding linear solvers which permit nonlinear or variable preconditioning. Originally motivated to avoid reduction scaling bottlenecks, they also show unexpected promise in mitigating performance variability in highly-distributed systems.

Second, ongoing work with DMStag, an object in PETSc for managing discretized PDEs on distributed staggered grids. As with other DM implementations, it allows users to conveniently work with parallel meshes and efficiently solve equations posed on the domains they represent. Crucially, they allow solvers such as multigrid to take advantage of geometric information. Examples involve approximate block factorization (“fieldsplit”) preconditioners and geometric multigrid for the variable-viscosity stationary Stokes equations.

Lastly, brief ideas for the future development of the library. These relate to “meeting people where they are” in terms of documentation and the potential tighter integration with emerging HPC workflows using Julia.

Please note that the meeting URL for this event can be seen on the cels-seminars website, which requires an Argonne login.