A Parallel Solver for Graph Laplacians

Problems from graph drawing, spectral clustering, network flow and graph partitioning can all be expressed in terms of graph Laplacian matrices. There are a variety of practical approaches to solving these problems in serial. However, as problem sizes increase and single core speeds stagnate, parallelism is essential to solve such problems quickly. We present an unsmoothed aggregation multigrid method for solving graph Laplacians in a distributed memory setting. We introduce new parallel aggregation and low degree elimination algorithms targeted specifically at irregular degree graphs. These algorithms are expressed in terms of sparse matrix-vector products using generalized sum and product operations. This formulation is amenable to linear algebra using arbitrary distributions and allows us to operate on a 2D sparse matrix distribution, which is necessary for parallel scalability. Our solver outperforms the natural parallel extension of the current state of the art in an algorithmic comparison. We demonstrate scalability to 576 processes and graphs with up to 1.7 billion edges.Comment: PASC '18, Code: https://github.com/ligmg/ligm

Recent Advances in Graph Partitioning

We survey recent trends in practical algorithms for balanced graph partitioning together with applications and future research directions

Using the VBARMS method in parallel computing

The paper describes an improved parallel MPI-based implementation of VBARMS, a variable block variant of the pARMS preconditioner proposed by Li, Saad and Sosonkina [NLAA, 2003] for solving general nonsymmetric linear systems. The parallel VBARMS solver can detect automatically exact or approximate dense structures in the linear system, and exploits this information to achieve improved reliability and increased throughput during the factorization. A novel graph compression algorithm is discussed that finds these approximate dense blocks structures and requires only one simple to use parameter. A complete study of the numerical and parallel performance of parallel VBARMS is presented for the analysis of large turbulent Navier-Stokes equations on a suite of three- dimensional test cases

Multilevel Variable-Block Schur-Complement-Based Preconditioning for the Implicit Solution of the Reynolds- Averaged Navier-Stokes Equations Using Unstructured Grids

Implicit methods based on the Newton’s rootfinding algorithm are receiving an increasing attention for the solution of complex Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) applications due to their potential to converge in a very small number of iterations. This approach requires fast convergence acceleration techniques in order to compete with other conventional solvers, such as those based on artificial dissipation or upwind schemes, in terms of CPU time. In this chapter, we describe a multilevel variable-block Schur-complement-based preconditioning for the implicit solution of the Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes equations using unstructured grids on distributed-memory parallel computers. The proposed solver detects automatically exact or approximate dense structures in the linear system arising from the discretization, and exploits this information to enhance the robustness and improve the scalability of the block factorization. A complete study of the numerical and parallel performance of the solver is presented for the analysis of turbulent Navier-Stokes equations on a suite of three-dimensional test cases