[Trilinos-Users] Help choosing a matrix format (CRS/VBR)

[Pat Notz]

Hi,

I'm very new to developing against Trilinos. I started out by watching
Mike's day-1 intro talks from TUG2010 and reading the Epetra tutorial
from the didasko project. In Mike's presentation, he mostly discusses
Epetra_CrsMatrix but mentions the Epetra_VbrMatrix and the FE versions
of those matrices. In particular, the FEVbrMatrix sounds appropriate
because I have multiple unknowns per mesh point and I'm doing a
distributed FEM assembly.

I'm looking for example code that uses either VbrMatrix or FEVbrMatrix
but it seems most people prefer CrsMatrix. Even the FEI package
appears to use CrsMatrix and so does the Albany project, which is a
multivariate FEM code.

I'm curious what motivates the choice of CrsMatrix for general FEM
codes (if anyone here knows).

Thanks ~ Pat