Amesos: A Set Of General Interfaces To Sparse Direct Solver Libraries

We present the AMESOS project, which aims to define a set of general, flexible, consistent, reusable and efficient interfaces to direct solution software libraries for systems of linear equations on both serial and distributed memory architectures. AMESOS is composed of a collection of pure virtual classes, as well as several concrete implementations in the C++ language. These classes allow access to the linear system matrix and vector elements and their distribution, and control the solution of the linear system. 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 approach.