An indispensable part of our lives, computing has also become essential to
industries and governments. Steady improvements in computer hardware have been
supported by periodic doubling of transistor densities in integrated circuits
over the last fifty years. Such Moore scaling now requires increasingly heroic
efforts, stimulating research in alternative hardware and stirring controversy.
To help evaluate emerging technologies and enrich our understanding of
integrated-circuit scaling, we review fundamental limits to computation: in
manufacturing, energy, physical space, design and verification effort, and
algorithms. To outline what is achievable in principle and in practice, we
recall how some limits were circumvented, compare loose and tight limits. We
also point out that engineering difficulties encountered by emerging
technologies may indicate yet-unknown limits.Comment: 15 pages, 4 figures, 1 tabl
We discuss an approach for solving sparse or dense banded linear systems
Ax=b on a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) card. The
matrix A∈RN×N is possibly nonsymmetric and
moderately large; i.e., 10000≤N≤500000. The ${\it split\ and\
parallelize}({\tt SaP})approachseekstopartitionthematrix{\bf A}intodiagonalsub−blocks{\bf A}_i,i=1,\ldots,P,whichareindependentlyfactoredinparallel.Thesolutionmaychoosetoconsiderortoignorethematricesthatcouplethediagonalsub−blocks{\bf A}_i.Thisapproach,alongwiththeKrylovsubspace−basediterativemethodthatitpreconditions,areimplementedinasolvercalled{\tt SaP::GPU},whichiscomparedintermsofefficiencywiththreecommonlyusedsparsedirectsolvers:{\tt PARDISO},{\tt SuperLU},and{\tt MUMPS}.{\tt SaP::GPU},whichrunsentirelyontheGPUexceptseveralstagesinvolvedinpreliminaryrow−columnpermutations,isrobustandcompareswellintermsofefficiencywiththeaforementioneddirectsolvers.InacomparisonagainstIntel′s{\tt MKL},{\tt SaP::GPU}alsofareswellwhenusedtosolvedensebandedsystemsthatareclosetobeingdiagonallydominant.{\tt SaP::GPU}$ is publicly available and distributed as
open source under a permissive BSD3 license.Comment: 38 page