Evening Workshops, CMCMM 2011

Workshop
Thursday, March 31, 2011
7:30 pm - 8:30pm


 

PyAMG Tutorial

Luke Olson and Jacob Schroder

Workshop Slides

Abstract

This tutorial gives an overview of the software package PyAMG (www.pyamg.org), a Python module aimed at portable, efficient and reproducible algebraic multigrid (AMG) methods, and also at rapid prototyping of new methods. PyAMG includes classical AMG and smoothed aggregation (SA), in addition to newer techniques, such as advanced coarsening and energy-minimization of coarse grids, making the package an accessible environment for extending popular existing methods and comparing against new methods. PyAMG is easy-to-use and the code is readable, making it especially well-suited for These features have contributed to PyAMG's popularity, with thousands of downloads from over one hundred countries. It is being used for core development of AMG, it has proven to be an efficient solver for a variety of applications in the sciences and imaging, and it has been easily integrated into several largely Python-based simulation packages.

This tutorial focuses on the recently released version 2.0, and is broken up into three parts, in order to highlight features for beginning, intermediate, and advanced users.

Tutorial Format

The tutorial includes optional interactive components, and participants are encouraged to pre-install PyAMG 2.0 and its dependencies. Alternatively, participants may bring laptops and use provided bootable DVDs, which boot into a Linux environment with all the required packages pre-installed. However, the boot discs will not provide a full-featured environment where results and scripts can be saved locally.

PyAMG has been tested in Python 2.6 and depends on SciPy (0.7.1), which is used for sparse matrix support and operations, as well as NumPy (1.4.1). Additionally, Nose (0.11.3) is required to execute unit tests in the package and Matplotlib (0.99.1) is required for many of the demos in the Examples directory. The tutorial will utilize features of the interactive Python environment iPython, and several of the advanced examples will use a g++ compiler to link the C++ code snippets to the Python code.

PyAMG 2.0 source and binaries are available through the project downloads page. The dependencies can be installed through package managers, from binaries directly supplied by the packages, or by compiling from source. The dependencies and recommended packages again are

After installation, PyAMG, NumPy and SciPy should be tested. From the interactive iPython prompt, type
>>> import numpy, scipy, pyamg
>>> numpy.test()
>>> scipy.test()
>>> pyamg.test()

Tutorial Outline

Beginners

  • Overview of Matlab-like interface available through SciPy and NumPy
  • Overview of structure and functionality of PyAMG package
  • Classical AMG and SA
  • Krylov solvers
  • Relaxation methods
  • Multilevel-solver object

    Intermediate

  • Plotting and visualizations through Paraview and Matplotlib
  • Overview of some advanced coarsening and interpolation options
  • How to modify an existing multilevel solver object

    Advanced

  • Overview of the hybrid C++/PyAMG framework
  • Swig provides language interface and basis for efficiency
  • Basic Swig example, i.e., calling a C++ function from Python

    Developers will be available for discussion following the tutorial.