Using PyTrilinos: A Tutorial

Spotz
Wednesday, November 8th
11:00 - 11:45 am

This will be a hands-on tutorial for using the python interface to Trilinos. Participants will need a laptop on which Trilinos has already been compiled. We will cover building PyTrilinos as part of the tutorial, but for time considerations will only do so by enabling Epetra. If you wish to work with other PyTrilinos modules (which is recommended), you will need to build them yourself prior to the tutorial. See the PyTrilinos FAQ section on configuration for more details.

Software prerequisites for PyTrilinos are:

• Python version 2.3 or greater (but not python 2.5; the wrapper generator does not work with python 2.5 yet).
• SWIG version 1.3.29 (1.3.28 is generally acceptable, but earlier versions are incompatible). This is the "Simple Wrapper and Interface Generator", which generates the python extension module code.
• NumPy version 0.9.6 or higher. Release 1.0 final should be available by the time of the tutorial. "NumPy" is short for "Numerical Python", and it provides very high-level python access to strided, heterogeneous data via n-dimensional arrays. If you choose, you could install SciPy, which provides NumPy automatically.

Optional software:

• MPI. While I doubt many of you have multi-processor laptops, if you have MPI installed, you can experiment with the MPI version of PyTrilinos using threads.
• MatPlotLib, a python plotting package with Matlab-like syntax. This software has a lot of dependencies and can often cause difficulties when installing. However, if you can get it installed, it is pretty nice, and it can handle Epetra array-type objects.

Participants should have these software packages installed prior to the tutorial. Give yourself some time, and if you have troubles, feel free to contact Bill Spotz. It is also recommended that participants attempt to build all or several of the PyTrilinos modules prior to the tutorial. Release 7.0.0 supports the following packages:

• Amesos
• AztecOO
• Epetra
• EpetraExt
• Galeri
• IFPACK
• ML
• New_Package
• Teuchos
• TriUtils

(Note that Anasazi, LOCA, NOX and Thyra are disabled in the 7.0.0 release.) See the PyTrilinos configuration FAQ for further details.

Topics to be covered:

• Building PyTrilinos (Teuchos and Epetra only)
• Installing PyTrilinos
• Getting help for PyTrilinos
• An interactive exploration of Epetra
• Parameter lists
• Writing scripts to solve problems

Feel free to bring your own favorite pet problem for developing a script. The wider the variety of problems that participants will try to solve, the longer the list of good questions will be.