3,551 research outputs found
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
Research and Education in Computational Science and Engineering
Over the past two decades the field of computational science and engineering
(CSE) has penetrated both basic and applied research in academia, industry, and
laboratories to advance discovery, optimize systems, support decision-makers,
and educate the scientific and engineering workforce. Informed by centuries of
theory and experiment, CSE performs computational experiments to answer
questions that neither theory nor experiment alone is equipped to answer. CSE
provides scientists and engineers of all persuasions with algorithmic
inventions and software systems that transcend disciplines and scales. Carried
on a wave of digital technology, CSE brings the power of parallelism to bear on
troves of data. Mathematics-based advanced computing has become a prevalent
means of discovery and innovation in essentially all areas of science,
engineering, technology, and society; and the CSE community is at the core of
this transformation. However, a combination of disruptive
developments---including the architectural complexity of extreme-scale
computing, the data revolution that engulfs the planet, and the specialization
required to follow the applications to new frontiers---is redefining the scope
and reach of the CSE endeavor. This report describes the rapid expansion of CSE
and the challenges to sustaining its bold advances. The report also presents
strategies and directions for CSE research and education for the next decade.Comment: Major revision, to appear in SIAM Revie
A Tuned and Scalable Fast Multipole Method as a Preeminent Algorithm for Exascale Systems
Among the algorithms that are likely to play a major role in future exascale
computing, the fast multipole method (FMM) appears as a rising star. Our
previous recent work showed scaling of an FMM on GPU clusters, with problem
sizes in the order of billions of unknowns. That work led to an extremely
parallel FMM, scaling to thousands of GPUs or tens of thousands of CPUs. This
paper reports on a a campaign of performance tuning and scalability studies
using multi-core CPUs, on the Kraken supercomputer. All kernels in the FMM were
parallelized using OpenMP, and a test using 10^7 particles randomly distributed
in a cube showed 78% efficiency on 8 threads. Tuning of the
particle-to-particle kernel using SIMD instructions resulted in 4x speed-up of
the overall algorithm on single-core tests with 10^3 - 10^7 particles. Parallel
scalability was studied in both strong and weak scaling. The strong scaling
test used 10^8 particles and resulted in 93% parallel efficiency on 2048
processes for the non-SIMD code and 54% for the SIMD-optimized code (which was
still 2x faster). The weak scaling test used 10^6 particles per process, and
resulted in 72% efficiency on 32,768 processes, with the largest calculation
taking about 40 seconds to evaluate more than 32 billion unknowns. This work
builds up evidence for our view that FMM is poised to play a leading role in
exascale computing, and we end the paper with a discussion of the features that
make it a particularly favorable algorithm for the emerging heterogeneous and
massively parallel architectural landscape
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