Amesos: General Interfaces to Direct Solver Libraries

We discuss the design of general, flexible, consistent, reusable and ecient interfaces to direct solution software libraries for systems of linear equations on both serial and distributed memory architectures. We introduce a set of abstract classes to access the linear system matrix elements and their distribution, to access vector elements, and control the solution of the linear system. We describe a concrete implementation of the proposed interfaces, and we report numerical results that show that the overhead induced by the object-oriented design is negligible under typical conditions of usage. We include examples of applications, and we comment on the advantages and limitations of the design.