2,511 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
Matrix Factorization at Scale: a Comparison of Scientific Data Analytics in Spark and C+MPI Using Three Case Studies
We explore the trade-offs of performing linear algebra using Apache Spark,
compared to traditional C and MPI implementations on HPC platforms. Spark is
designed for data analytics on cluster computing platforms with access to local
disks and is optimized for data-parallel tasks. We examine three widely-used
and important matrix factorizations: NMF (for physical plausability), PCA (for
its ubiquity) and CX (for data interpretability). We apply these methods to
TB-sized problems in particle physics, climate modeling and bioimaging. The
data matrices are tall-and-skinny which enable the algorithms to map
conveniently into Spark's data-parallel model. We perform scaling experiments
on up to 1600 Cray XC40 nodes, describe the sources of slowdowns, and provide
tuning guidance to obtain high performance
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