Henricus Bouwmeester

Emmanuel Agullo, Henricus Bouwmeester, Jack Dongarra et al.

The algorithms in the current sequential numerical linear algebra libraries (e.g. LAPACK) do not parallelize well on multicore architectures. A new family of algorithms, the tile algorithms, has recently been introduced. Previous research has shown that it is possible to write efficient and scalable tile algorithms for performing a Cholesky factorization, a (pseudo) LU factorization, and a QR factorization. In this extended abstract, we attack the problem of the computation of the inverse of a symmetric positive definite matrix. We observe that, using a dynamic task scheduler, it is relatively painless to translate existing LAPACK code to obtain a ready-to-be-executed tile algorithm. However we demonstrate that non trivial compiler techniques (array renaming, loop reversal and pipelining) need then to be applied to further increase the parallelism of our application. We present preliminary experimental results.

Henricus Bouwmeester, Andrew Dougherty, Andrew V. Knyazev

We numerically analyze the possibility of turning off post-smoothing (relaxation) in geometric multigrid when used as a preconditioner in conjugate gradient linear and eigenvalue solvers for the 3D Laplacian. The geometric Semicoarsening Multigrid (SMG) method is provided by the hypre parallel software package. We solve linear systems using two variants (standard and flexible) of the preconditioned conjugate gradient (PCG) and preconditioned steepest descent (PSD) methods. The eigenvalue problems are solved using the locally optimal block preconditioned conjugate gradient (LOBPCG) method available in hypre through BLOPEX software. We observe that turning off the post-smoothing in SMG dramatically slows down the standard PCG-SMG. For flexible PCG and LOBPCG, our numerical results show that post-smoothing can be avoided, resulting in overall acceleration, due to the high costs of smoothing and relatively insignificant decrease in convergence speed. We numerically demonstrate for linear systems that PSD-SMG and flexible PCG-SMG converge similarly if SMG post-smoothing is off. We experimentally show that the effect of acceleration is independent of memory interconnection. A theoretical justification is provided.

Henricus Bouwmeester

The current computer architecture has moved towards the multi/many-core structure. However, the algorithms in the current sequential dense numerical linear algebra libraries (e.g. LAPACK) do not parallelize well on multi/many-core architectures. A new family of algorithms, the tile algorithms, has recently been introduced to circumvent this problem. Previous research has shown that it is possible to write efficient and scalable tile algorithms for performing a Cholesky factorization, a (pseudo) LU factorization, and a QR factorization. The goal of this thesis is to study tiled algorithms in a multi/many-core setting and to provide new algorithms which exploit the current architecture to improve performance relative to current state-of-the-art libraries while maintaining the stability and robustness of these libraries.