Some general questions about Firedrake:

1) I ran the poisson_mixed.py example and noticed in the Memory Usage section of -log_summary that there are more creations than destructions. In my experience, not properly destroying PETSc objects can inhibit performance. Is this an issue for you guys? As in, are you guys properly taking care of the memory allocation and related issues?

2) How do I read in an auxiliary data from a datafile? In FEniCS I could load data as a numpy array and use CellFunction() to "align" the data with the connectivity/ordering of the cells. 

3) Is there any update regarding adding parallel IO? Last I spoke with Matt he said that he and one or two of you Firedrake folks (Michael Lange I think?) were working on this.

4) Do you guys support Hexahedron elements? When I look through the documentation for UnitCubeMesh and BoxMesh, I see no option for non-tetrahedron elements.

Thanks,

Justin