.. ----------------------------------------------------------------
   SUNDIALS Copyright Start
   Copyright (c) 2002-2022, Lawrence Livermore National Security
   and Southern Methodist University.
   All rights reserved.

   See the top-level LICENSE and NOTICE files for details.

   SPDX-License-Identifier: BSD-3-Clause
   SUNDIALS Copyright End
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.. _NVectors:

######################
Vector Data Structures
######################

The SUNDIALS library comes packaged with a variety of NVECTOR
implementations, designed for simulations in serial, shared-memory
parallel, and distributed-memory parallel environments, as well as
interfaces to vector data structures used within external linear
solver libraries.  All native implementations assume that the
process-local data is stored contiguously, and they in turn provide a
variety of standard vector algebra operations that may be performed on
the data.

In addition, SUNDIALS provides a simple interface for generic vectors
(akin to a C++ *abstract base class*).  All of the major SUNDIALS
solvers (CVODE(s), IDA(s), KINSOL, ARKODE) in turn are constructed to
only depend on these generic vector operations, making them immediately
extensible to new user-defined vector objects.  The only exceptions to
this rule relate to the dense, banded and sparse-direct linear system
solvers, since they rely on particular data storage and access
patterns in the NVECTORS used.



.. toctree::
   :maxdepth: 1

   NVector_API_link.rst
   IDAS_requirements
   NVector_links.rst
