POOMA vs PETSc on Beowulf Clusters
William Gropp
gropp at mcs.anl.gov
Fri Feb 14 11:05:48 PST 2003
At 09:48 AM 2/14/2003 -0800, kaustuv wrote:
>Hi,
> I am looking for a nice matrix library for parallel applications (mostly
>solution of Partial Differential Equations on structured Grids over
>cluster of linux boxes), and after a lot of web-searching I stumbled upon
>these two...PETSc and POOMA. Having gone through the manuals of the two I
>had following comparision chart:
>
>PETSc:
>-----
> PROS:
> + Easy development of parallel applications & is in public domain.
> + Lot of Numerical libraries supported (Basic Backend is LAPACK)
> + Writen in C, so should give highly optimized code even with average
> compilers.
> CONS:
> - You cannot extract an single indivisual element of array directly.
> - No Stencils (like ones available in BLITZ++/POOMA) to make life easy.
> - Not suited for Matrix Free methods for it assumes you finally have a
> matrix (which might be costly to create even in compressed format)
We clearly need to improve the documentation of PETSc. Let me make a few
changes in the above:
PROS:
Change "Basic Backend is LAPACK" to something like "Many numerical
algorithms and libraries supported, with an emphasis on iterative sparse
matrix methods"
CONS:
PETSc does support (and there are examples that use) Matrix-Free
methods. Perhaps this should go into "PROS" :)
In terms of scalability, a code using PETSc won a Gordon Bell prize,
scaling well to over 3000 processors; recent runs of the same problem on a
250-node Beowulf have reached nearly 200 GFlops for an unstructured mesh
CFD code.
Bill
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