Design Patterns for Sparse-Matrix Computations on Hybrid CPU/GPU Platforms

We apply object-oriented software design patterns to develop code for scientific software involving sparse matrices. Design patterns arise when multiple independent developments produce similar designs which converge onto a generic solution. We demonstrate how to use design patterns to implement an interface for sparse matrix computations on NVIDIA GPUs starting from PSBLAS, an existing sparse matrix library, and from existing sets of GPU kernels for sparse matrices. We also compare the throughput of the PSBLAS sparse matrix–vector multiplication on two platforms exploiting the GPU with that obtained by a CPU-only PSBLAS implementation. Our experiments exhibit encouraging results regarding the comparison between CPU and GPU executions in double precision, obtaining a speedup of up to 35.35 on NVIDIA GTX 285 with respect to AMD Athlon 7750, and up to 10.15 on NVIDIA Tesla C2050 with respect to Intel Xeon X5650

Exploring Capabilities within ForTrilinos by Solving the 3D Burgers Equation

We present the first three-dimensional, partial differential equation solver to be built atop the recently released, open-source ForTrilinos package (http://trilinos.sandia.gov/packages/fortrilinos). ForTrilinos currently provides portable, object-oriented Fortran 2003 interfaces to the C++ packages Epetra, AztecOO and Pliris in the Trilinos library and framework [ACM Trans. Math. Softw.31(3) (2005), 397–423]. Epetra provides distributed matrix and vector storage and basic linear algebra calculations. Pliris provides direct solvers for dense linear systems. AztecOO provides iterative sparse linear solvers. We demonstrate how to build a parallel application that encapsulates the Message Passing Interface (MPI) without requiring the user to make direct calls to MPI except for startup and shutdown. The presented example demonstrates the level of effort required to set up a high-order, finite-difference solution on a Cartesian grid. The example employs an abstract data type (ADT) calculus [Sci. Program.16(4) (2008), 329–339] that empowers programmers to write serial code that lower-level abstractions resolve into distributed-memory, parallel implementations. The ADT calculus uses compilable Fortran constructs that resemble the mathematical formulation of the partial differential equation of interest