[petsc-dev] Julia Petsc Wrapper

[Jared Crean]

Hello,
     I am a graduate student working on a CFD code written in Julia, 
and I am interested in using Petsc as a linear solver (and possibly for 
the non-linear solves as well) for the code.  I discovered the Julia 
wrapper file Petsc.jl in Petsc and have updated it to work with the 
current version of Julia and the MPI.jl package, using only MPI for 
communication (I don't think Julia's internal parallelism will scale 
well enough, at least not in the near future).

     I read the discussion on Github 
[https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/issues/2645], and it looks like
there currently is not a complete package to access Petsc from Julia.  
With your permission, I would like to use the Petsc.jl file as the basis 
for developing a package.  My plan is create a lower level interface 
that exactly wraps Petsc functions, and then construct a higher level 
interface, probably an object that is a subtype of Julia's 
AbstractArray, that allows users to store values into Petsc vectors and 
matrices.  I am less interested in integrating tightly with Julia's 
existing linear algebra capabilities than ensuring good scalability.  
The purpose of the high level interface it simple to populate the vector 
or matrix.

     What do you think, both about using the Petsc.jl file and the  
overall approach?

     Jared Crean