# PETSc AI Website

Generative AI provides unprecedented opportunities to transform strategies for research and development (R&D) of scientific software, with the ultimate goal of accelerating scientific insight.
PETSc—the Portable, Extensible Toolkit for Scientific Computation—provides foundational software for scalable numerical solvers, including related numerical optimization (TAO).

- Learn more about PETSc /TAO at <https://petsc.org>

## Vision for PETSc AI Agents

Our goal is to create PETSc AI agents and an agent community capable of understanding and executing scientific computing tasks at the heart of numerical library research, providing the AI equivalent of human PETSc developers using LLM technology, while also continually advancing the PETSc knowledge base.

:::{figure} /images/petsc-ai-topics.*
:alt: Key domains for PETSc AI agemts
:width: 600
:::

This diagram illustrates key domains in which we envision LLM-powered agents to meaningfully assist PETSc R&D and user support while also augmenting the PETSc knowledge base for long-term community advances. We do not aim to replace human developers, but rather to extend their capabilities and improve productivity. These AI agents will operate within the collaborative infrastructure of PETSc—subject to the same review and git merge request processes as human contributors—to ensure that any changes to the official knowledge base are carefully vetted. 


## Recent Progress

- **MCP tools for scientific computing with PETSc**
  - Project info: <https://mcp.petsc-ai.org>
  - Initial emphasis: A common framework of basic MCP agents that provide building blocks for more advanced functionality

- **PETScAgent-Bench**
  - Framework for writing PETSc/TAO benchmarks and using them to evaluate output from LLM-based agents or environments
  - Project repo: <https://github.com/petsc/petscagent-bench> 
  - News! Feb 2026: 3rd-place winner in the Code Generation track of the [AgentX-AgentBeats](https://rdi.berkeley.edu/agentx-agentbeats) competition

- **AI assistants to enhance and exploit the PETSc knowledge base**
  - Sept 2025, <https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.20608>


## Next Steps

 Build on this foundation to create advanced AI capabilities as needed for next-generation science.

Note: Work on PETSc AI agents is being pursued by a subset of PETSc developers, including team members at Argonne National Laboratory.