131 research outputs found
Improving multifrontal methods by means of block low-rank representations
Submitted for publication to SIAMMatrices coming from elliptic Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) have been shown to have a low-rank property: well defined off-diagonal blocks of their Schur complements can be approximated by low-rank products. Given a suitable ordering of the matrix which gives to the blocks a geometrical meaning, such approximations can be computed using an SVD or a rank-revealing QR factorization. The resulting representation offers a substantial reduction of the memory requirement and gives efficient ways to perform many of the basic dense algebra operations. Several strategies have been proposed to exploit this property. We propose a low-rank format called Block Low-Rank (BLR), and explain how it can be used to reduce the memory footprint and the complexity of direct solvers for sparse matrices based on the multifrontal method. We present experimental results that show how the BLR format delivers gains that are comparable to those obtained with hierarchical formats such as Hierarchical matrices (H matrices) and Hierarchically Semi-Separable (HSS matrices) but provides much greater flexibility and ease of use which are essential in the context of a general purpose, algebraic solver
Parallel accelerated cyclic reduction preconditioner for three-dimensional elliptic PDEs with variable coefficients
We present a robust and scalable preconditioner for the solution of
large-scale linear systems that arise from the discretization of elliptic PDEs
amenable to rank compression. The preconditioner is based on hierarchical
low-rank approximations and the cyclic reduction method. The setup and
application phases of the preconditioner achieve log-linear complexity in
memory footprint and number of operations, and numerical experiments exhibit
good weak and strong scalability at large processor counts in a distributed
memory environment. Numerical experiments with linear systems that feature
symmetry and nonsymmetry, definiteness and indefiniteness, constant and
variable coefficients demonstrate the preconditioner applicability and
robustness. Furthermore, it is possible to control the number of iterations via
the accuracy threshold of the hierarchical matrix approximations and their
arithmetic operations, and the tuning of the admissibility condition parameter.
Together, these parameters allow for optimization of the memory requirements
and performance of the preconditioner.Comment: 24 pages, Elsevier Journal of Computational and Applied Mathematics,
Dec 201
An efficient multi-core implementation of a novel HSS-structured multifrontal solver using randomized sampling
We present a sparse linear system solver that is based on a multifrontal
variant of Gaussian elimination, and exploits low-rank approximation of the
resulting dense frontal matrices. We use hierarchically semiseparable (HSS)
matrices, which have low-rank off-diagonal blocks, to approximate the frontal
matrices. For HSS matrix construction, a randomized sampling algorithm is used
together with interpolative decompositions. The combination of the randomized
compression with a fast ULV HSS factorization leads to a solver with lower
computational complexity than the standard multifrontal method for many
applications, resulting in speedups up to 7 fold for problems in our test
suite. The implementation targets many-core systems by using task parallelism
with dynamic runtime scheduling. Numerical experiments show performance
improvements over state-of-the-art sparse direct solvers. The implementation
achieves high performance and good scalability on a range of modern shared
memory parallel systems, including the Intel Xeon Phi (MIC). The code is part
of a software package called STRUMPACK -- STRUctured Matrices PACKage, which
also has a distributed memory component for dense rank-structured matrices
A distributed-memory package for dense Hierarchically Semi-Separable matrix computations using randomization
We present a distributed-memory library for computations with dense
structured matrices. A matrix is considered structured if its off-diagonal
blocks can be approximated by a rank-deficient matrix with low numerical rank.
Here, we use Hierarchically Semi-Separable representations (HSS). Such matrices
appear in many applications, e.g., finite element methods, boundary element
methods, etc. Exploiting this structure allows for fast solution of linear
systems and/or fast computation of matrix-vector products, which are the two
main building blocks of matrix computations. The compression algorithm that we
use, that computes the HSS form of an input dense matrix, relies on randomized
sampling with a novel adaptive sampling mechanism. We discuss the
parallelization of this algorithm and also present the parallelization of
structured matrix-vector product, structured factorization and solution
routines. The efficiency of the approach is demonstrated on large problems from
different academic and industrial applications, on up to 8,000 cores.
This work is part of a more global effort, the STRUMPACK (STRUctured Matrices
PACKage) software package for computations with sparse and dense structured
matrices. Hence, although useful on their own right, the routines also
represent a step in the direction of a distributed-memory sparse solver
A Direct Elliptic Solver Based on Hierarchically Low-rank Schur Complements
A parallel fast direct solver for rank-compressible block tridiagonal linear
systems is presented. Algorithmic synergies between Cyclic Reduction and
Hierarchical matrix arithmetic operations result in a solver with arithmetic complexity and memory footprint. We provide a
baseline for performance and applicability by comparing with well known
implementations of the -LU factorization and algebraic multigrid
with a parallel implementation that leverages the concurrency features of the
method. Numerical experiments reveal that this method is comparable with other
fast direct solvers based on Hierarchical Matrices such as -LU and
that it can tackle problems where algebraic multigrid fails to converge
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Preparing sparse solvers for exascale computing.
Sparse solvers provide essential functionality for a wide variety of scientific applications. Highly parallel sparse solvers are essential for continuing advances in high-fidelity, multi-physics and multi-scale simulations, especially as we target exascale platforms. This paper describes the challenges, strategies and progress of the US Department of Energy Exascale Computing project towards providing sparse solvers for exascale computing platforms. We address the demands of systems with thousands of high-performance node devices where exposing concurrency, hiding latency and creating alternative algorithms become essential. The efforts described here are works in progress, highlighting current success and upcoming challenges. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue 'Numerical algorithms for high-performance computational science'
Hierarchical interpolative factorization for elliptic operators: differential equations
This paper introduces the hierarchical interpolative factorization for
elliptic partial differential equations (HIF-DE) in two (2D) and three
dimensions (3D). This factorization takes the form of an approximate
generalized LU/LDL decomposition that facilitates the efficient inversion of
the discretized operator. HIF-DE is based on the multifrontal method but uses
skeletonization on the separator fronts to sparsify the dense frontal matrices
and thus reduce the cost. We conjecture that this strategy yields linear
complexity in 2D and quasilinear complexity in 3D. Estimated linear complexity
in 3D can be achieved by skeletonizing the compressed fronts themselves, which
amounts geometrically to a recursive dimensional reduction scheme. Numerical
experiments support our claims and further demonstrate the performance of our
algorithm as a fast direct solver and preconditioner. MATLAB codes are freely
available.Comment: 37 pages, 13 figures, 12 tables; to appear, Comm. Pure Appl. Math.
arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1307.266
Recent advances in sparse direct solvers
International audienceDirect methods for the solution of sparse systems of linear equations of the form A x = b are used in a wide range of numerical simulation applications. Such methods are based on the decomposition of the matrix into a product of triangular factors (e.g., A = L U ), followed by triangular solves. They are known for their numerical accuracy and robustness but are also characterized by a high memory consumption and a large amount of computations. Here we survey some research directions that are being investigated by the sparse direct solver community to alleviate these issues: memory-aware scheduling techniques, low-rank approximations, and distributed/shared memory hybrid programming
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Parallel accelerated cyclic reduction preconditioner for three-dimensional elliptic PDEs with variable coefficients
We present a robust and scalable preconditioner for the solution of large-scale linear systems that arise from the discretization of elliptic PDEs amenable to rank compression. The preconditioner is based on hierarchical low-rank approximations and the cyclic reduction method. The setup and application phases of the preconditioner achieve log-linear complexity in memory footprint and number of operations, and numerical experiments exhibit good weak and strong scalability at large processor counts in a distributed memory environment. Numerical experiments with linear systems that feature symmetry and nonsymmetry, definiteness and indefiniteness, constant and variable coefficients demonstrate the preconditioner applicability and robustness. Furthermore, it is possible to control the number of iterations via the accuracy threshold of the hierarchical matrix approximations and their arithmetic operations, and the tuning of the admissibility condition parameter. Together, these parameters allow for optimization of the memory requirements and performance of the preconditioner
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