Re: [Help-gsl] gsl vs. petsc

[Rhys Ulerich]

On Tue, May 8, 2012 at 6:58 PM, Gideon Simpson <address@hidden> wrote:
> While I've used petsc for some larger numerical linear algebra projects
> (typically on the order of 10000 degrees of freedom), I'd thought that
> smaller problems, with sizes of <= 100 degrees of freedom could be
> well handled by serial algorithms.  But petsc obviously has a much
> more extensive collection of solvers for sparse systems.  I was
> wondering, has anyone compared performance between the two
> libraries on smaller problems?

I'll wager that writing dense matrix operations using the GSL when the
GSL is backed by a good BLAS implementation will win for <= 100 DOF
problems.  But, I've never compared PETSc vs GSL in any meaningful way
(and therefore I'm ignoring any PETSc dense capabilities you might
use).

Like all small work, I suspect your development time will greatly
swamp the running time (by a factor of 10,000? 1,000,000?) for small
work.  I'd lean towards whatever you're most effective at using when
developing.

- Rhys