Portable, Extensible Toolkit for Scientific Computation

The Portable, Extensible Toolkit for Scientific Computation (PETSc, pronounced PET-see; the S is silent), is a suite of data structures and routines developed by Argonne National Laboratory for the scalable (parallel) solution of scientific applications modeled by partial differential equations. It employs the Message Passing Interface (MPI) standard for all message-passing communication. The current version of PETSc is 3.7. PETSc is the world’s most widely used parallel numerical software library for partial differential equations and sparse matrix computations. PETSc received an R&D 100 Award in 2009. The PETSc Core Development Group won the SIAM/ACM Prize in Computational Science and Engineering for 2015

Contents

• Components
• Features and Modules
• References

PETSc is intended for use in large-scale application projects, many ongoing computational science projects are built around the PETSc libraries. Its careful design allows advanced users to have detailed control over the solution process. PETSc includes a large suite of parallel linear and nonlinear equation solvers that are easily used in application codes written in C, C++, Fortran and now Python. PETSc provides many of the mechanisms needed within parallel application code, such as simple parallel matrix and vector assembly routines that allow the overlap of communication and computation. In addition, PETSc includes support for parallel distributed arrays useful for finite difference methods.