On Feb 21, 2013, at 8:44 PM, Jed Brown <jedbrown at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:

> On Thu, Feb 21, 2013 at 7:28 PM, Boyce Griffith <griffith at cims.nyu.edu> 
> wrote:
> 
> I would very happily use an "undefined" vector size.  (I will also happily 
> change the bogus local sizes from 0 to 1, and the global sizes accordingly. 
> :-)
> 
> The PETSc solvers that we use in the code should be oblivious to the size of 
> the vector.  I've actually never been all that happy with size "0", but it 
> was in some inherited code, and at least so far, it has never caused any 
> problems over the 10+ years it has been in use.  (If ever did start causing 
> problems, I certainly would not come complaining to petsc-users or petsc-dev. 
>  It isn't like I do not realize that "0" is a potentially problematic value 
> here.)
> 
> I actually have always hoped that setting size to "0" would help smoke out 
> any places where something actually did use the vector size.
>  
> Okay, let's move the design discussion to petsc-dev.
> 
> I want to understand the extent to your adaptivity and how your Vecs 
> "behave". In which places do you (mathematically) change the dimension of a 
> vector?

These applications are mainly transient solvers in which regridding happens 
"between" time steps.

> If I start with Vecs X and Y and I write
> 
> VecCopy(X,Y);
> YourSolver(X); /* solve F(X) = 0 with adaptivity */
> 
> can I then compare the result like this?
> 
> VecAXPY(Y,-1.,X);

Absolutely.

> Do vector-space properties of Y (e.g., norm) change when I call 
> YourSolver(X). (Some codes keep a global view of all vectors, and when they 
> adapt, they regrid all vectors. But regridding doesn't preserve things like 
> norms, so you end up with tangled semantics.)

At present all solvers operate only on fixed grid configurations.  I do not 
expect this to change any time soon.

-- Boyce
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