595 research outputs found
Composing Scalable Nonlinear Algebraic Solvers
Most efficient linear solvers use composable algorithmic components, with the
most common model being the combination of a Krylov accelerator and one or more
preconditioners. A similar set of concepts may be used for nonlinear algebraic
systems, where nonlinear composition of different nonlinear solvers may
significantly improve the time to solution. We describe the basic concepts of
nonlinear composition and preconditioning and present a number of solvers
applicable to nonlinear partial differential equations. We have developed a
software framework in order to easily explore the possible combinations of
solvers. We show that the performance gains from using composed solvers can be
substantial compared with gains from standard Newton-Krylov methods.Comment: 29 pages, 14 figures, 13 table
A parallel multigrid solver for multi-patch Isogeometric Analysis
Isogeometric Analysis (IgA) is a framework for setting up spline-based
discretizations of partial differential equations, which has been introduced
around a decade ago and has gained much attention since then. If large spline
degrees are considered, one obtains the approximation power of a high-order
method, but the number of degrees of freedom behaves like for a low-order
method. One important ingredient to use a discretization with large spline
degree, is a robust and preferably parallelizable solver. While numerical
evidence shows that multigrid solvers with standard smoothers (like Gauss
Seidel) does not perform well if the spline degree is increased, the multigrid
solvers proposed by the authors and their co-workers proved to behave optimal
both in the grid size and the spline degree. In the present paper, the authors
want to show that those solvers are parallelizable and that they scale well in
a parallel environment.Comment: The first author would like to thank the Austrian Science Fund (FWF)
for the financial support through the DK W1214-04, while the second author
was supported by the FWF grant NFN S117-0
Opt: A Domain Specific Language for Non-linear Least Squares Optimization in Graphics and Imaging
Many graphics and vision problems can be expressed as non-linear least
squares optimizations of objective functions over visual data, such as images
and meshes. The mathematical descriptions of these functions are extremely
concise, but their implementation in real code is tedious, especially when
optimized for real-time performance on modern GPUs in interactive applications.
In this work, we propose a new language, Opt (available under
http://optlang.org), for writing these objective functions over image- or
graph-structured unknowns concisely and at a high level. Our compiler
automatically transforms these specifications into state-of-the-art GPU solvers
based on Gauss-Newton or Levenberg-Marquardt methods. Opt can generate
different variations of the solver, so users can easily explore tradeoffs in
numerical precision, matrix-free methods, and solver approaches. In our
results, we implement a variety of real-world graphics and vision applications.
Their energy functions are expressible in tens of lines of code, and produce
highly-optimized GPU solver implementations. These solver have performance
competitive with the best published hand-tuned, application-specific GPU
solvers, and orders of magnitude beyond a general-purpose auto-generated
solver
Evaluating the Impact of SDC on the GMRES Iterative Solver
Increasing parallelism and transistor density, along with increasingly
tighter energy and peak power constraints, may force exposure of occasionally
incorrect computation or storage to application codes. Silent data corruption
(SDC) will likely be infrequent, yet one SDC suffices to make numerical
algorithms like iterative linear solvers cease progress towards the correct
answer. Thus, we focus on resilience of the iterative linear solver GMRES to a
single transient SDC. We derive inexpensive checks to detect the effects of an
SDC in GMRES that work for a more general SDC model than presuming a bit flip.
Our experiments show that when GMRES is used as the inner solver of an
inner-outer iteration, it can "run through" SDC of almost any magnitude in the
computationally intensive orthogonalization phase. That is, it gets the right
answer using faulty data without any required roll back. Those SDCs which it
cannot run through, get caught by our detection scheme
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