Ahmad Abdelfattah

Ahmad Abdelfattah, Massimiliano Fasi

The singular value decomposition (SVD) is a powerful tool in modern numerical linear algebra, which underpins computational methods such as principal component analysis (PCA), low-rank approximations, and randomized algorithms. Many practical scenarios require solving numerous small SVD problems, a regime generally referred to as "batch SVD". Existing programming models can handle this efficiently on parallel CPU architectures, but high-performance solutions for GPUs remain immature. A GPU-oriented batch SVD solver is introduced. This solver exploits the one-sided Jacobi algorithm to exploit fine-grained parallelism, and a number of algorithmic and design optimizations achieve unmatched performance. Starting from a baseline solver, a sequence of optimizations is applied to obtain incremental performance gains. Numerical experiments show that the new solver is robust across problems with different numerical properties, matrix shapes, and arithmetic precisions. Performance benchmarks on both NVIDIA and AMD systems show significant performance speedups over vendor solutions as well as existing open-source solvers.

Ahmad Abdelfattah, Jack Dongarra, Massimiliano Fasi et al.

Ootomo, Ozaki, and Yokota [Int. J. High Perform. Comput. Appl., 38 (2024), p. 297-313] have proposed a strategy to recast a floating-point matrix multiplication in terms of integer matrix products. The factors A and B are split into integer slices, the product of these slices is computed exactly, and AB is approximated by accumulating these integer products in floating-point arithmetic. This technique is particularly well suited to mixed-precision matrix multiply-accumulate units with integer support, such as the NVIDIA tensor cores or the AMD matrix cores. The number of slices allows for performance-accuracy tradeoffs: more slices yield better accuracy but require more multiplications, which in turn reduce performance. We propose an inexpensive way to estimate the minimum number of multiplications needed to achieve a prescribed level of accuracy. Our error analysis shows that the algorithm may become inaccurate (or inefficient) if rows of A or columns of B are badly scaled. We perform a range of numerical experiments, both in simulation and on the latest NVIDIA GPUs, that confirm the analysis and illustrate strengths and weaknesses of the algorithm.

Chiang-Heng Chien, Hongyi Fan, Ahmad Abdelfattah et al.

Systems of polynomial equations arise frequently in computer vision, especially in multiview geometry problems. Traditional methods for solving these systems typically aim to eliminate variables to reach a univariate polynomial, e.g., a tenth-order polynomial for 5-point pose estimation, using clever manipulations, or more generally using Grobner basis, resultants, and elimination templates, leading to successful algorithms for multiview geometry and other problems. However, these methods do not work when the problem is complex and when they do, they face efficiency and stability issues. Homotopy Continuation (HC) can solve more complex problems without the stability issues, and with guarantees of a global solution, but they are known to be slow. In this paper we show that HC can be parallelized on a GPU, showing significant speedups up to 26 times on polynomial benchmarks. We also show that GPU-HC can be generically applied to a range of computer vision problems, including 4-view triangulation and trifocal pose estimation with unknown focal length, which cannot be solved with elimination template but they can be efficiently solved with HC. GPU-HC opens the door to easy formulation and solution of a range of computer vision problems.