Hi Matt,

Thanks so much for the quick reply!

Regarding #2, I put some debug statement in my code and what I find is that 
when I use createWithArray on my Cython-allocated numpy array, the destructor I 
set for it is no longer called when I delete the array. (If I don’t use 
createWithArray then the destructor is triggered.) I interpret that to suggest 
that the petsc4py Vec is somehow ’taking over’ management of the numpy array. 
But I don’t understand where that could be happening. (I don’t think it has to 
do with the actual freeing of memory by PETSc's VecDestroy.)

createWithArray calls iarray_s which in turn calls PyArray_FROM_OTF. Could it 
be there’s something going on there? The numpy documentation is unclear.

Lisandro: do you have any thoughts on this?

Thanks,

Samar

On May 2, 2024, at 11:56 PM, Matthew Knepley <[email protected]> wrote:

On Thu, May 2, 2024 at 12:53 PM Samar Khatiwala 
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
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Hello,

I have a couple of questions about createWithArray in petsc4py:

1) What is the correct usage for creating a standard MPI Vec with it? Something 
like this seems to work but is it right?:

On each rank do:
a = np.zeros(localSize)
v = PETSc.Vec().createWithArray(a, comm=PETSc.COMM_WORLD)

Is that all it takes?

That looks right to me.

2) Who ‘owns’ the underlying memory for a Vec created with the createWithArray 
method, i.e., who is responsible for managing it and doing garbage collection? 
In my problem, the numpy array is created in a Cython module where memory is 
allocated, and a pointer to it is associated with a numpy ndarray via 
PyArray_SimpleNewFromData and PyArray_SetBaseObject. I have a deallocator 
method of my own that is called when the numpy array is deleted/goes out of 
scope/whenever python does garbage collection. All of that works fine. But if I 
use this array to create a Vec with createWithArray what happens when the Vec 
is, e.g., destroyed? Will my deallocator be called?

No. The PETSc struct will be deallocated, but the storage will not be touched.

  Thanks,

     Matt

Or does petsc4py know that it doesn’t own the memory and won’t attempt to free 
it? I can’t quite figure out from the petsc4py code what is going on. And help 
would be appreciated.

Thanks very much.

Samar




--
What most experimenters take for granted before they begin their experiments is 
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