This page documents my effort to package the PETSc software suite for the Debian operating system.  PETSc is a scalable framework for scientific computations on parallel processing machines or clusters, currently focused on solving systems of partial differential equations.  The upstream authors are at Argonne National Labs.

I'm also working on a 3-D viewer library, see the petscgraphics page.

Package description:

The package description that was here is now in the README.Debian file that ships with petsc2.1.0-dev.

Questions/issues:

• Unfortunately, atlas build trouble on PPC means the PPC packages and other 32-bit big-endian platforms (sparc, mips, m68k) are built without it.
• The linux_alpha_dec PETSC_ARCH doesn't currently build properly.  This will get fixed soon.  Like, when the fstat bug is resolved in the Q Fortran compilers...
• Is lam or mpich faster for large clusters?  Make whichever is faster the default.

To do (in roughly decreasing order of priority):

• Make a C++ class library in a thin wrapper (header files) and contribute upstream, along with a test or two.
• If bug #69864 is approved (proposed Debian policy amendment), then change /usr/share/doc/petsc2.0.29-examples/examples to src.
• (Long-term) Think about how to incorporate the complex libs into this framework (possibly as static libs only?).
• (Long-term) Patch the configure.in to make it work and send the patch upstream.  Using this would make the patch-debian file somewhat smaller and would get rid of some of the ugliness in rules' install targets, and would be easier to reconcile with future upgrades.
• (Long-term) Package BlockSolve, ParMETIS, etc., make the PETSc makefiles use them, and make the petsc packages depend on them. :-)
• (Long-term) Make an unstructured mesh class with ParMETIS distribution and 3-D viewing, and contribute it upstream.