Firedrake meeting 2023 05 31

Date and time 2023-05-31 16:00 BST (1500 UTC)

Action Items

1. Pick Chair and Minuter (KS 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: KS, JB, DH, CW, NB, RNH, DD

Apologies:

DH: Firedrake user meeting

• Event website is live!

RNH Broken Ubuntu Install

• Cython files made by firedrake not linking to correct PETSc
• Only some people getting problem, so must be people who have PETSc related environment variables set
• Need to know a more reliable failure more to be able to investigate

CW: Lazy petsc4py.PETSc import?

I think that it is possible to delay the import of petsc4py.PETSc such that from firedrake import * can run without calling PETSc Initialize. This will make importing Firedrake do less "magic". In particular MPI Init would not be called so we could use OpenMPI for running our parallel tests.

Is this idea worth spending any time on?

• Yes please!
• Being able to use default mpi would make our install much simpler

Merge PRs

JB: #2892 Add Firedrake manual to website + Github (still missing DOI). Merged!

JB: #2871 Change GH actions + Firedrake docker images. Also build website on GH pages automatically. Needs some small changes

KS: pgfplot (https://github.com/firedrakeproject/firedrake/pull/2939) Merged!

CW - A general caching solution that would work for the adjoint (I think)

• Discussed briefly
• Good solution for most users (i.e. a nice-to-have)
• Overall not sure what the right answer is

RNH - Point evaluation on immersed manifolds status

• After the students have submitted (in 2 weeks) fix the bugs and merge

Date of next meeting

1600 BST (1500 UTC) 2023-06-07