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Preparing sparse solvers for exascale computing

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences

Heroux, Michael A.; Anzt, Hartwig; Boman, Erik G.; Falgout, Rob; Ghysels, Pieter; Li, Xiaoye; Mcinnes, Lois C.; Mills, Richard T.; Rajamanickam, Sivasankaran; Rupp, Karl; Smith, Bryce; Yamazaki, Ichitaro; Yang, Ulrike M.

Sparse solvers provide essential functionality for a wide variety of scientific applications. Highly parallel sparse solvers are essential for continuing advances in high-fidelity, multi-physics and multi-scale simulations, especially as we target exascale platforms. This paper describes the challenges, strategies and progress of the US Department of Energy Exascale Computing project towards providing sparse solvers for exascale computing platforms. We address the demands of systems with thousands of high-performance node devices where exposing concurrency, hiding latency and creating alternative algorithms become essential. The efforts described here are works in progress, highlighting current success and upcoming challenges. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue 'Numerical algorithms for high-performance computational science'.

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An algebraic sparsified nested dissection algorithm using low-rank approximations

SIAM Journal on Matrix Analysis and Applications

Cambier, Leopold; Boman, Erik G.; Rajamanickam, Sivasankaran; Tuminaro, Raymond S.; Darve, Eric

We propose a new algorithm for the fast solution of large, sparse, symmetric positive-definite linear systems, spaND (sparsified Nested Dissection). It is based on nested dissection, sparsification, and low-rank compression. After eliminating all interiors at a given level of the elimination tree, the algorithm sparsifies all separators corresponding to the interiors. This operation reduces the size of the separators by eliminating some degrees of freedom but without introducing any fill-in. This is done at the expense of a small and controllable approximation error. The result is an approximate factorization that can be used as an efficient preconditioner. We then perform several numerical experiments to evaluate this algorithm. We demonstrate that a version using orthogonal factorization and block-diagonal scaling takes fewer CG iterations to converge than previous similar algorithms on various kinds of problems. Furthermore, this algorithm is provably guaranteed to never break down and the matrix stays symmetric positive-definite throughout the process. We evaluate the algorithm on some large problems show it exhibits near-linear scaling. The factorization time is roughly \scrO (N), and the number of iterations grows slowly with N.

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A robust hierarchical solver for ill-conditioned systems with applications to ice sheet modeling

Journal of Computational Physics

Chen, Chao; Cambier, Leopold; Boman, Erik G.; Rajamanickam, Sivasankaran; Tuminaro, Raymond S.; Darve, Eric

A hierarchical solver is proposed for solving sparse ill-conditioned linear systems in parallel. The solver is based on a modification of the LoRaSp method, but employs a deferred-compression technique, which provably reduces the approximation error and significantly improves efficiency. Moreover, the deferred-compression technique introduces minimal overhead and does not affect parallelism. As a result, the new solver achieves linear computational complexity under mild assumptions and excellent parallel scalability. To demonstrate the performance of the new solver, we focus on applying it to solve sparse linear systems arising from ice sheet modeling. The strong anisotropic phenomena associated with the thin structure of ice sheets creates serious challenges for existing solvers. To address the anisotropy, we additionally developed a customized partitioning scheme for the solver, which captures the strong-coupling direction accurately. In general, the partitioning can be computed algebraically with existing software packages, and thus the new solver is generalizable for solving other sparse linear systems. Our results show that ice sheet problems of about 300 million degrees of freedom have been solved in just a few minutes using 1024 processors.

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Fast and Robust Linear Solvers based on Hierarchical Matrices (LDRD Final Report)

Boman, Erik G.; Darve, Eric; Lehoucq, Rich; Rajamanickam, Sivasankaran; Tuminaro, Raymond S.; Yamazaki, Ichitaro

This report is the final report for the LDRD project "Fast and Robust Linear Solvers using Hierarchical Matrices". The project was a success. We developed two novel algorithms for solving sparse linear systems. We demonstrated their effectiveness on ill-conditioned linear systems from ice sheet simulations. We showed that in many cases, we can obtain near-linear scaling. We believe this approach has strong potential for difficult linear systems and should be considered for other Sandia and DOE applications. We also report on some related research activities in dense solvers and randomized linear algebra.

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Results 51–75 of 228
Results 51–75 of 228