Firedrake meeting 2023 06 14

Date and time 2023-06-14 16:00 BST (1500 UTC)

Action Items

1. Pick Chair and Minuter (NB to pick minuter)
2. ALL: (ongoing) triage the open issues and confirm if they are indeed still open (and perhaps provide labels)
3. JB: Move PyOP2 and FInAT to firedrakeproject
4. ALL: do things with SV's branches
5. ALL: discuss preparation for Firedrake User meeting
6. DH: Email to Andreas to have 2 loopy PRs merged
7. DH: Get firedrake a docker open source account (link here)

Agenda

Present: RK, DH, CW (minuter), KS, DD, JB, NB

Apologies:

CW: Lazy petsc4py import update (prior minutes)

Sadly this is just not possible without significant petsc4py changes/Cython magic. I can avoid lazy imports in Python but cimport petsc4py.PETSc is everywhere in our Cython code and this also initialises PETSc (and hence MPI).

• DH: This would require potentially involved changes in petsc4py equivalent to mpi4py (import mpi4py; mpi4py.rc.initialize = False; from mpi4py import MPI).

CW: Adjoint caching strategies

See https://github.com/firedrakeproject/firedrake/issues/2979.

• DH: Creating solvers is inherently expensive because of work done factorising the matrices.
• DH: The need for a linear solver in the adjoint will go away with dual spaces because we can have cofunctions as RHS. Therefore optimising the linear solve at present may not be a current priority.
• DH: We could possibly replace NonlinearVariationalSolver and LinearVariationalSolver with VariationalSolver in future.

Merge PRs

UZ: 2986 Fix Netgen demo

JB: 2987 Firedrake Manual DOI

JB: 2927 Constants - MERGED!

DD: 2982 Delegate checkpoint in recompute. - changes requested

Date of next meeting

1600 BST (1500 UTC) 2023-06-21