Parallel Computation of Finite Element Navier-Stokes codes using MUMPS Solver

The study deals with the parallelization of 2D and 3D finite element based Navier-Stokes codes using direct solvers. Development of sparse direct solvers using multifrontal solvers has significantly reduced the computational time of direct solution methods. Although limited by its stringent memory requirements, multifrontal solvers can be computationally efficient. First the performance of MUltifrontal Massively Parallel Solver (MUMPS) is evaluated for both 2D and 3D codes in terms of memory requirements and CPU times. The scalability of both Newton and modified Newton algorithms is tested

Software Support for Irregular and Loosely Synchronous Problems

A large class of scientific and engineering applications may be classified as irregular and loosely synchronous from the perspective of parallel processing. We present a partial classification of such problems. This classification has motivated us to enhance Fortran D to provide language support for irregular, loosely synchronous problems. We present techniques for parallelization of such problems in the context of Fortran D

High performance interior point methods for three-dimensional finite element limit analysis

The ability to obtain rigorous upper and lower bounds on collapse loads of various structures makes finite element limit analysis an attractive design tool. The increasingly high cost of computing those bounds, however, has limited its application on problems in three dimensions. This work reports on a high-performance homogeneous self-dual primal-dual interior point method developed for three-dimensional finite element limit analysis. This implementation achieves convergence times over 4.5× faster than the leading commercial solver across a set of three-dimensional finite element limit analysis test problems, making investigation of three dimensional limit loads viable. A comparison between a range of iterative linear solvers and direct methods used to determine the search direction is also provided, demonstrating the superiority of direct methods for this application. The components of the interior point solver considered include the elimination of and options for handling remaining free variables, multifrontal and supernodal Cholesky comparison for computing the search direction, differences between approximate minimum degree [1] and nested dissection [13] orderings, dealing with dense columns and fixed variables, and accelerating the linear system solver through parallelization. Each of these areas resulted in an improvement on at least one of the problems in the test set, with many achieving gains across the whole set. The serial implementation achieved runtime performance 1.7× faster than the commercial solver Mosek [5]. Compared with the parallel version of Mosek, the use of parallel BLAS routines in the supernodal solver saw a 1.9× speedup, and with a modified version of the GPU-enabled CHOLMOD [11] and a single NVIDIA Tesla K20c this speedup increased to 4.65×

PHIST: a Pipelined, Hybrid-parallel Iterative Solver Toolkit

The increasing complexity of hardware and software environments in high-performance computing poses big challenges on the development of sustainable and hardware-efcient numerical software. This paper addresses these challenges in the context of sparse solvers. Existing solutions typically target sustainability, flexibility or performance, but rarely all of them. Our new library PHIST provides implementations of solvers for sparse linear systems and eigenvalue problems. It is a productivity platform for performance-aware developers of algorithms and application software with abstractions that do not obscure the view on hardware-software interaction. The PHIST software architecture and the PHIST development process were designed to overcome shortcomings of existing packages. An interface layer for basic sparse linear algebra functionality that can be provided by multiple backends ensures sustainability, and PHIST supports common techniques for improving scalability and performance of algorithms such as blocking and kernel fusion. We showcase these concepts using the PHIST implementation of a block Jacobi-Davidson solver for non-Hermitian and generalized eigenproblems. We study its performance on a multi-core CPU, a GPU and a large-scale many-core system. Furthermore, we show how an existing implementation of a block Krylov-Schur method in the Trilinos package Anasazi can beneft from the performance engineering techniques used in PHIST

Implementation and Scalability Analysis of Balancing Domain Decomposition Methods

In this paper we present a detailed description of a high-performance distributed-memory implementation of balancing domain decomposition preconditioning techniques. This coverage provides a pool of implementation hints and considerations that can be very useful for scientists that are willing to tackle large-scale distributed-memory machines using these methods. On the other hand, the paper includes a comprehensive performance and scalability study of the resulting codes when they are applied for the solution of the Poisson problem on a large-scale multicore-based distributed-memory machine with up to 4096 cores. Well-known theoretical results guarantee the optimality (algorithmic scalability) of these preconditioning techniques for weak scaling scenarios, as they are able to keep the condition number of the preconditioned operator bounded by a constant with fixed load per core and increasing number of cores. The experimental study presented in the paper complements this mathematical analysis and answers how far can these methods go in the number of cores and the scale of the problem to still be within reasonable ranges of efficiency on current distributed-memory machines. Besides, for those scenarios where poor scalability is expected, the study precisely identifies, quantifies and justifies which are the main sources of inefficiency