Drew Parsons <[email protected]> writes:
> If I understand correctly, it's dangerous to simply enable 64-bit in > PETSc alone. It needs to be done all along the computational library > stack. In the case of PETSc, is the intention to change to using the 64-bit indexing option, or to provide a new additional package that uses 64-bit indexing? The latter sounds burdensome long-term, so I would probably lean towards the former. If you do intend to go for the former, I think it's a good idea to very clearly warn the user upon upgrade. The PETSc binary sparse matrix and vector file formats are assumed to use whatever indexing data types that the library is compiled with, and as far as I remember there is no metadata about this in the file format itself. Without warning, I suspect a lot of users might burn themselves when using LoadMat [1] and friends on data files written with 32 bit index versions of the package. I don't know how common the file format is and whether most people just use HDF5, but I know I've often used the PETSc format to avoid the complications of HDF5. PS: I can volunteer to write a 32->64 bit conversion tool for these files if desired. Ideally I guess upstream should provide 32/64-bit specific versions of the reading/writing functions. [1] https://www.mcs.anl.gov/petsc/petsc-current/docs/manualpages/Mat/MatLoad.html Best, Gard
