Firedrake meeting 2024 11 20

Date and time 2024-11-20 1600 UTC

Action Items

1. Pick Chair and Minuter (PB to pick)
2. ALL: (ongoing) triage the open issues and confirm if they are indeed still open (and perhaps provide labels)
3. CW (formerly JB): Move PyOP2 and TSFC to firedrake and move FInAT to FIAT
4. ALL: do things with SV's branches
5. DH: Email to Andreas to have 2 (+ others!!!) loopy PRs merged TODO: FIND OUT WHICH PRS THESE ARE
6. DH: Get Firedrake a docker open source account (link here)
7. DH: Talk to GregVernon about PR#2116.
8. JB: Enable merge queues (minutes)
9. LC: Try to merge RNH' PR: Movable VOM
10. ANY: Add Python 3.13 to PyOP2, TSFC, FIAT, FInAT CI (and others?)
11. UZ: ngsPETSc releases (minutes) (more or less done)
12. PB: Speed up some tests (minutes)
13. RK: sort out Firedrake USA details and website before Christmas time
14. CW: tackle Loopy warnings

Minutes

Present: CW (minuter), UZ, FA, JHC, PB, DH, KS, DD, RK, LC, IM

Apologies:

PB: speed up some tests

• DH: multi-minute compile times seems like a bug. We are possibly having a recursive tree walk or exploding a DAG into a tree.
• Action point: PB profile codegen to see what is slow.

pyadjoint PR#177

Allow set_working_tape and stop_annotating to be used as function decorators, and implement no_annotations in terms of stop_annotating.

• Interface bikeshedding. Small TODOs.

CW: Merging JB's big merge

https://github.com/firedrakeproject/firedrake/pull/3817 is very nearly ready I believe. I am keen to get it merged ASAP as it is holding up any changes to PyOP2.

• DH: --doi to firedrake-install never really worked. Is prepared to lose this.
• Action point: fix firedrake-zenodo.
• Action point: check install and zenodo pages for inaccuracies.
• Once these and checklist items addressed happy-ish to merge.
• DH: Script entrypoints may not work. Good candidate for fdtools.

CW: (related) What is the long-term vision for Firedrake installation?

• I believe that we want to be moving towards pip install firedrake (even without a wheel) as the sole installation method.
• firedrake-install should be made much more minimal, effectively building PETSc and then called pip install firedrake. Importantly this means:
  • The script should not manage homebrew or apt
  • Extra packages like pytorch, gusto etc should not be installed via special flags. They can just be pip-installed.

Thoughts? If people agree then I can work to rip out a lot of code and incrementally improve the installation process.

• DH: firedrake-install can go away! Likes idea of having a firedrake-build-petsc script and pip install firedrake. The former could spit out the environment variables that need setting.
• DH: Not concerned about supporting firedrake-update.

PB: RestrictedFunctionSpace

Ongoing discussion on what is the right interface to restrict any FunctionSpace given the bcs of a problem.

My proposal: RestrictedFunctionSpace(MixedFunctionSpace, bcs)

PR needs review

• More discussion (and clarity) needed

Merge PRs

Note that PRs put in this section should either be trivial or already have been reviewed. Discussion-worthy PRs should be separate agenda items.

1. UZ+PB: ngsPETSc was not installed via pip PR#3873 (merged)

2. DD: Disk checkpointing for adjoints with schedules: Firedrake PR 3812 (tiny change requested) + Pyadjoint PR 173 (basically ready)

3. KS: dtype (merged)

Date of next meeting

1600 UTC 2024-11-20