🚀 go-pugleaf

I've just had a nasty time moving a sparse solver onto a Cray to support 
some chemistry/hydrodynamic finite element work.  The difficulty convinced
our group to give some thought to what math libraries we want to be using
in the next few years, both public and private domain.

In particular, several solvers, both public domain and commercial, failed
numerically on the speciation problem, much to my surprise.

Dongarra's LAPACK seems to be a common denominator for many folks, but it
doesn't cover all our needs, particularly large sparse systems.  Many of the
sparse solvers don't give much in the way of non-symmetric matrices, either,
which rules them out for our chemistry, if not our FE things.

So I want to survey the net with a few general questions about mid- to large 
sized matrix solvers.  Respond by email, and I'll summarize the results.


	What general matrix solvers do you use in you codes?  
		Why this solver?
		Are you happy with it?	

	If you do sparse matrix work, what solver do you use?  
		Why this solver?
		Is your problem symmetric?
		Are you happy with it?	

	If you do banded matrix work, what solver do you use?  
		Why this solver?
		Are you happy with it?	

Thanks for your help, back in a week or so.

					Cheers,

					Jim Hurst
					jhurst@ese.ogi.edu