Amesos: A Set of General Interfaces to Sparse Direct Solver Libraries

Abstract. 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 collec-tion 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 so-lution 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.