Pipelined Krylov subspace methods (also referred to as communication-hiding
methods) have been proposed in the literature as a scalable alternative to
classic Krylov subspace algorithms for iteratively computing the solution to a
large linear system in parallel. For symmetric and positive definite system
matrices the pipelined Conjugate Gradient method outperforms its classic
Conjugate Gradient counterpart on large scale distributed memory hardware by
overlapping global communication with essential computations like the
matrix-vector product, thus hiding global communication. A well-known drawback
of the pipelining technique is the (possibly significant) loss of numerical
stability. In this work a numerically stable variant of the pipelined Conjugate
Gradient algorithm is presented that avoids the propagation of local rounding
errors in the finite precision recurrence relations that construct the Krylov
subspace basis. The multi-term recurrence relation for the basis vector is
replaced by two-term recurrences, improving stability without increasing the
overall computational cost of the algorithm. The proposed modification ensures
that the pipelined Conjugate Gradient method is able to attain a highly
accurate solution independently of the pipeline length. Numerical experiments
demonstrate a combination of excellent parallel performance and improved
maximal attainable accuracy for the new pipelined Conjugate Gradient algorithm.
This work thus resolves one of the major practical restrictions for the
useability of pipelined Krylov subspace methods.Comment: 15 pages, 5 figures, 1 table, 2 algorithm