On the design of interfaces to sparse direct solvers

Abstract

We discuss the design of general, flexible, consistent, reusable, and efficient interfaces to software libraries for the direct solution of systems of linear equations on both serial and distributed memory architectures. We introduce a set of abstract classes to access the linear system matrix elements and their distribution, access vector elements, and control the solution of the linear system. We describe a concrete implementation of the proposed interfaces, and report examples of applications and numerical results showing that the overhead induced by the object-oriented design is negligible under typical conditions of usage. We include examples of applications, and we comment on the advantages and limitations of the design.