2009 R&D 100 Winner
Computer simulations allow organizations to replace costly and dangerous experiments and prototypes. PETSc Release 3.0: the Portable Extensible Toolkit for Scientific Computation from Argonne National Laboratory, Argonne, Ill., allows engineers and scientists to perform large-scale numerical simulations of physical phenomena rapidly and efficiently. The open source software package, designed for the solution of partial differential equations (PDEs), is used in diverse applications from surgery to environmental remediation. PETSc supports all commonly used computational environments, ranging from Microsoft Windows systems to the largest parallel computers from IBM and Cray. It provides direct access to the linear solvers in many of competing packages.
Release 3.0 of PETSc is the only package with a parallel mesh management system that is fully integrated and can utilize the powerful algebraic solvers in PETSc. By disentangling global, topological operations, such as parallel assembly, from local, analytic operations, such as finite-element integration, it produces a much cleaner and more maintainable code base and enables simulation of a much wider array of phenomena. It also offers Fortran 90 support.
Technology
Simulation software
Developer
Argonne National Laboratory
