The alternative to using PETSc's SNES solvers in parallel without using the DMDA methods

Question

I am using the PETSc libraries, in particular using the SNES solver package to solve a nonlinear matrix equation. Is there a way of parallelising the solution to this problem problem without using the DMDA distributed array methods?

I have looked through the pets manual and the coverage of parallel nonlinear solvers is not well covered.

Answer 1

There is nothing about SNES that requires DMDA. Create a Vec distributed however you would like the state and residual to be distributed, then use SNESSetFunction() and (optionally) SNESSetJacobian(). See SNES ex2.c for an example that does not use DM.