PETSc for Python

Author:

Lisandro Dalcin

Contact:

dalcinl@gmail.com

Web Site:

https://gitlab.com/petsc/petsc

Date:

Oct 21, 2025

Abstract

This document describes petsc4py, a Python wrapper to the PETSc libraries.

PETSc (the Portable, Extensible Toolkit for Scientific Computation) is a suite of data structures and routines for the scalable (parallel) solution of scientific applications modeled by partial differential equations. It employs the MPI standard for all message-passing communication.

This package provides an important subset of PETSc functionalities and uses NumPy to efficiently manage input and output of array data.

A good friend of petsc4py is:

• mpi4py: Python bindings for MPI, the Message Passing Interface.

Other projects depend on petsc4py:

• slepc4py: Python bindings for SLEPc, the Scalable Library for Eigenvalue Problem Computations.

Contents

• PETSc Overview
  • Components
• Installation
  • Install from PyPI using pip
  • Install from the PETSc source tree
  • Running the testing suite
  • Building the documentation
• Contributing
• Citations

Python specifics

• Reference
  • petsc4py
  • petsc4py.typing
  • petsc4py.PETSc
• PETSc Python types
  • PETSc Python matrix type
  • PETSc Python preconditioner type
  • PETSc Python linear solver type
  • PETSc Python nonlinear solver type (TODO)
  • PETSc Python ode-integrator type (TODO)
  • PETSc Python optimization solver type (TODO)
• Working with PETSc options
• petsc4py demos
• Documentation standards for petsc4py
  • Docstring standards
  • Type hint standards