Summary
This chapter aims to answer the following question: Can the high-level programming language Python be used to develop sufficiently efficient parallel solvers for partial differential equations (PDEs)? We divide our investigation into two aspects, namely (1) the achievable performance of a parallel program that extensively uses Python programming and its associated data structures, and (2) the Python implementation of generic software modules for parallelizing existing serial PDE solvers. First of all, numerical computations need to be based on the special array data structure of the Numerical Python package, either in pure Python or in mixed-language Python-C/C++ or Python/Fortran setting. To enable high-performance message passing in parallel Python software, we use the small add-on package pypar, which provides efficient Python wrappers to a subset of MPI routines. Using concrete numerical examples of solving wave-type equations, we will show that a mixed Python-C/Fortran implementation is able to provide fully comparable computational speed in comparison with a pure C or Fortran implementation. In particular, a serial legacy Fortran 77 code has been parallelized in a relatively straightforward manner and the resulting parallel Python program has a clean and simple structure.
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Cai, X., Langtangen, H.P. (2006). Parallelizing PDE Solvers Using the Python Programming Language. In: Bruaset, A.M., Tveito, A. (eds) Numerical Solution of Partial Differential Equations on Parallel Computers. Lecture Notes in Computational Science and Engineering, vol 51. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-31619-1_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-31619-1_9
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