[SciPy-dev] the current state and future directions of the sparse solvers

[Robert Cimrman]

Hi Nathan,

Nathan Bell wrote:
>>  OK, that sounds very good. I am going to study how to start such a
>>  scikit and we are going to move our additional solvers we have in
>>  sfepy to it (pysparse, soon petsc4py) -- are you ok with that Robert?
>>  :) Plus umfpack.  Plus the eigensolvers, like primme, blzpack and
>>  others.

Sure!

> I just recently saw a talk by some people that work on providing
> abstract interfaces to the solvers in Trilinos:
> http://trilinos.sandia.gov/packages/docs/r8.0/packages/stratimikos/doc/html/index.html
> http://trilinos.sandia.gov/packages/belos/
> 
> I have no experience with these, but they may provide some guidance.

I will look at this for inspiration, too, but see below.

>>  Do you have some idea about the interface? I noticed the
>>  linalg/interface.py, that's the way to go. This is only for the
>>  iterative solvers though.
> 
> LinearOperator was designed to formalize the interface expected by
> isolve/iterative.py
> 
> I haven't thought about it much since then, so it's possible that
> additions/modifications will be necessary.

What do you think about the proposal of the various solver classes I 
posted? We (with Ondrej) could try it as a proof-of-concept within the 
solvers scikit that is slowly emerging from this discussion.

cheers,
r.