Domain-specific high-productivity environments are playing an increasingly
important role in scientific computing due to the levels of abstraction and
automation they provide. In this paper we introduce Devito, an open-source
domain-specific framework for solving partial differential equations from
symbolic problem definitions by the finite difference method. We highlight the
generation and automated execution of highly optimized stencil code from only a
few lines of high-level symbolic Python for a set of scientific equations,
before exploring the use of Devito operators in seismic inversion problems.