Solving Lattice QCD systems of equations using mixed precision solvers on GPUs

Modern graphics hardware is designed for highly parallel numerical tasks and promises significant cost and performance benefits for many scientific applications. One such application is lattice quantum chromodyamics (lattice QCD), where the main computational challenge is to efficiently solve the discretized Dirac equation in the presence of an SU(3) gauge field. Using NVIDIA's CUDA platform we have implemented a Wilson-Dirac sparse matrix-vector product that performs at up to 40 Gflops, 135 Gflops and 212 Gflops for double, single and half precision respectively on NVIDIA's GeForce GTX 280 GPU. We have developed a new mixed precision approach for Krylov solvers using reliable updates which allows for full double precision accuracy while using only single or half precision arithmetic for the bulk of the computation. The resulting BiCGstab and CG solvers run in excess of 100 Gflops and, in terms of iterations until convergence, perform better than the usual defect-correction approach for mixed precision.Comment: 30 pages, 7 figure

Matrix-free GPU implementation of a preconditioned conjugate gradient solver for anisotropic elliptic PDEs

Many problems in geophysical and atmospheric modelling require the fast solution of elliptic partial differential equations (PDEs) in "flat" three dimensional geometries. In particular, an anisotropic elliptic PDE for the pressure correction has to be solved at every time step in the dynamical core of many numerical weather prediction models, and equations of a very similar structure arise in global ocean models, subsurface flow simulations and gas and oil reservoir modelling. The elliptic solve is often the bottleneck of the forecast, and an algorithmically optimal method has to be used and implemented efficiently. Graphics Processing Units have been shown to be highly efficient for a wide range of applications in scientific computing, and recently iterative solvers have been parallelised on these architectures. We describe the GPU implementation and optimisation of a Preconditioned Conjugate Gradient (PCG) algorithm for the solution of a three dimensional anisotropic elliptic PDE for the pressure correction in NWP. Our implementation exploits the strong vertical anisotropy of the elliptic operator in the construction of a suitable preconditioner. As the algorithm is memory bound, performance can be improved significantly by reducing the amount of global memory access. We achieve this by using a matrix-free implementation which does not require explicit storage of the matrix and instead recalculates the local stencil. Global memory access can also be reduced by rewriting the algorithm using loop fusion and we show that this further reduces the runtime on the GPU. We demonstrate the performance of our matrix-free GPU code by comparing it to a sequential CPU implementation and to a matrix-explicit GPU code which uses existing libraries. The absolute performance of the algorithm for different problem sizes is quantified in terms of floating point throughput and global memory bandwidth.Comment: 18 pages, 7 figure