On the Design of Interfaces to Serial and Parallel Direct Solver Libraries.

We report on the design of general, flexible, consistent and efficient interfaces to direct solver algorithms for the solution of systems of linear equations. We suppose that such algorithms are available in form of software libraries, and we introduce a framework to facilitate the usage of these libraries. This framework is composed by two components: an abstract matrix interface to access the linear system matrix elements, and an abstract solver interface that controls the solution of the linear system. We describe a concrete implementation of the proposed framework, which allows a high-level view and usage of most of the currently available libraries that implements direct solution methods for linear systems. We comment on the advantages and limitation of the framework.