In this work, we consider the solution of boundary integral equations by
means of a scalable hierarchical matrix approach on clusters equipped with
graphics hardware, i.e. graphics processing units (GPUs). To this end, we
extend our existing single-GPU hierarchical matrix library hmglib such that it
is able to scale on many GPUs and such that it can be coupled to arbitrary
application codes. Using a model GPU implementation of a boundary element
method (BEM) solver, we are able to achieve more than 67 percent relative
parallel speed-up going from 128 to 1024 GPUs for a model geometry test case
with 1.5 million unknowns and a real-world geometry test case with almost 1.2
million unknowns. On 1024 GPUs of the cluster Titan, it takes less than 6
minutes to solve the 1.5 million unknowns problem, with 5.7 minutes for the
setup phase and 20 seconds for the iterative solver. To the best of the
authors' knowledge, we here discuss the first fully GPU-based
distributed-memory parallel hierarchical matrix Open Source library using the
traditional H-matrix format and adaptive cross approximation with an
application to BEM problems