Taking advantage of hybrid systems for sparse direct solvers via task-based runtimes

The ongoing hardware evolution exhibits an escalation in the number, as well as in the heterogeneity, of computing resources. The pressure to maintain reasonable levels of performance and portability forces application developers to leave the traditional programming paradigms and explore alternative solutions. PaStiX is a parallel sparse direct solver, based on a dynamic scheduler for modern hierarchical manycore architectures. In this paper, we study the benefits and limits of replacing the highly specialized internal scheduler of the PaStiX solver with two generic runtime systems: PaRSEC and StarPU. The tasks graph of the factorization step is made available to the two runtimes, providing them the opportunity to process and optimize its traversal in order to maximize the algorithm efficiency for the targeted hardware platform. A comparative study of the performance of the PaStiX solver on top of its native internal scheduler, PaRSEC, and StarPU frameworks, on different execution environments, is performed. The analysis highlights that these generic task-based runtimes achieve comparable results to the application-optimized embedded scheduler on homogeneous platforms. Furthermore, they are able to significantly speed up the solver on heterogeneous environments by taking advantage of the accelerators while hiding the complexity of their efficient manipulation from the programmer.Comment: Heterogeneity in Computing Workshop (2014

An Arnoldi-frontal approach for the stability analysis of flows in a collapsible channel

In this paper, we present a new approach based on a combination of the Arnoldi and frontal methods for solving large sparse asymmetric and generalized complex eigenvalue problems. The new eigensolver seeks the most unstable eigensolution in the Krylov subspace and makes use of the efficiency of the frontal solver developed for the finite element methods. The approach is used for a stability analysis of flows in a collapsible channel and is found to significantly improve the computational efficiency compared to the traditionally used QZ solver or a standard Arnoldi method. With the new approach, we are able to validate the previous results obtained either on a much coarser mesh or estimated from unsteady simulations. New neutral stability solutions of the system have been obtained which are beyond the limits of previously used methods