Numerical Platon: A unified linear equation solver interface by CEA for solving open foe scientific applications

This paper describes a tool called ‘Numerical Platon’ developed by the French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA). It provides a freely available (GNU LGPL license) interface for coupling scientific computing applications to various freeware linear solver libraries (essentially PETSc, SuperLU and HyPre), together with some proprietary CEA solvers, for high-performance computers that may be used in industrial software written in various programming languages. This tool was developed as part of considerable efforts by the CEA Nuclear Energy Division in the past years to promote massively parallel software and on-shelf parallel tools to help develop new generation simulation codes. After the presentation of the package architecture and the available algorithms, we show examples of how Numerical Platon is used in sequential and parallel CEA codes. Comparing with in-house solvers, the gain in terms of increases in computation capacities or in terms of parallel performances is notable, without considerable extra development cost.