Title
A CPU-GPU hybrid approach for the unsymmetric multifrontal method
Abstract
Multifrontal is an efficient direct method for solving large-scale sparse and unsymmetric linear systems. The method transforms a large sparse matrix factorization process into a sequence of factorizations involving smaller dense frontal matrices. Some of these dense operations can be accelerated by using a graphic processing unit (GPU). We analyze the unsymmetric multifrontal method from both an algorithmic and implementational perspective to see how a GPU, in particular the NVIDIA Tesla C2070, can be used to accelerate the computations. Our main accelerating strategies include (i) performing BLAS on both CPU and GPU, (ii) improving the communication efficiency between the CPU and GPU by using page-locked memory, zero-copy memory, and asynchronous memory copy, and (iii) a modified algorithm that reuses the memory between different GPU tasks and sets thresholds to determine whether certain tasks be performed on the GPU. The proposed acceleration strategies are implemented by modifying UMFPACK, which is an unsymmetric multifrontal linear system solver. Numerical results show that the CPU-GPU hybrid approach can accelerate the unsymmetric multifrontal solver, especially for computationally expensive problems.
Year
DOI
Venue
2011
10.1016/j.parco.2011.09.002
Parallel Computing
Keywords
Field
DocType
unsymmetric multifrontal method,unsymmetric multifrontal linear system,page-locked memory,cpu-gpu hybrid approach,asynchronous memory copy,different gpu task,dense operation,unsymmetric linear system,efficient direct method,zero-copy memory,unsymmetric multifrontal solver,parallel computing
Asynchronous communication,Direct method,Central processing unit,Linear system,Computer science,Matrix (mathematics),Parallel computing,Theoretical computer science,Computational science,Acceleration,Solver,Computation
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
37
12
0167-8191
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
17
0.81
7
Authors
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Chenhan D. Yu1626.25
Weichung Wang212514.11
Dan'l Pierce3170.81