150 research outputs found
QR Factorization of Tall and Skinny Matrices in a Grid Computing Environment
Previous studies have reported that common dense linear algebra operations do
not achieve speed up by using multiple geographical sites of a computational
grid. Because such operations are the building blocks of most scientific
applications, conventional supercomputers are still strongly predominant in
high-performance computing and the use of grids for speeding up large-scale
scientific problems is limited to applications exhibiting parallelism at a
higher level. We have identified two performance bottlenecks in the distributed
memory algorithms implemented in ScaLAPACK, a state-of-the-art dense linear
algebra library. First, because ScaLAPACK assumes a homogeneous communication
network, the implementations of ScaLAPACK algorithms lack locality in their
communication pattern. Second, the number of messages sent in the ScaLAPACK
algorithms is significantly greater than other algorithms that trade flops for
communication. In this paper, we present a new approach for computing a QR
factorization -- one of the main dense linear algebra kernels -- of tall and
skinny matrices in a grid computing environment that overcomes these two
bottlenecks. Our contribution is to articulate a recently proposed algorithm
(Communication Avoiding QR) with a topology-aware middleware (QCG-OMPI) in
order to confine intensive communications (ScaLAPACK calls) within the
different geographical sites. An experimental study conducted on the Grid'5000
platform shows that the resulting performance increases linearly with the
number of geographical sites on large-scale problems (and is in particular
consistently higher than ScaLAPACK's).Comment: Accepted at IPDPS10. (IEEE International Parallel & Distributed
Processing Symposium 2010 in Atlanta, GA, USA.
A parallel Block Lanczos algorithm and its implementation for the evaluation of some eigenvalues of large sparse symmetric matrices on multicomputers
In the present work we describe HPEC (High Performance Eigenvalues Computation), a parallel software package for the
evaluation of some eigenvalues of a large sparse symmetric matrix. It implements an efficient and portable Block Lanczos
algorithm for distributed memory multicomputers. HPEC is based on basic linear algebra operations for sparse and dense
matrices, some of which have been derived by ScaLAPACK library modules. Numerical experiments have been carried out
to evaluate HPEC performance on a cluster of workstations with test matrices from Matrix Market and Higham’s collections.
A comparison with a PARPACKroutine is also detailed. Finally, parallel performance is evaluated on random matrices, using
standard parameters
A Class of Parallel Tiled Linear Algebra Algorithms for Multicore Architectures
As multicore systems continue to gain ground in the High Performance
Computing world, linear algebra algorithms have to be reformulated or new
algorithms have to be developed in order to take advantage of the architectural
features on these new processors. Fine grain parallelism becomes a major
requirement and introduces the necessity of loose synchronization in the
parallel execution of an operation. This paper presents an algorithm for the
Cholesky, LU and QR factorization where the operations can be represented as a
sequence of small tasks that operate on square blocks of data. These tasks can
be dynamically scheduled for execution based on the dependencies among them and
on the availability of computational resources. This may result in an out of
order execution of the tasks which will completely hide the presence of
intrinsically sequential tasks in the factorization. Performance comparisons
are presented with the LAPACK algorithms where parallelism can only be
exploited at the level of the BLAS operations and vendor implementations
- …