We evaluate optimized parallel sparse matrix-vector operations for two
representative application areas on widespread multicore-based cluster
configurations. First the single-socket baseline performance is analyzed and
modeled with respect to basic architectural properties of standard multicore
chips. Going beyond the single node, parallel sparse matrix-vector operations
often suffer from an unfavorable communication to computation ratio. Starting
from the observation that nonblocking MPI is not able to hide communication
cost using standard MPI implementations, we demonstrate that explicit overlap
of communication and computation can be achieved by using a dedicated
communication thread, which may run on a virtual core. We compare our approach
to pure MPI and the widely used "vector-like" hybrid programming strategy.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figure