Performance of parallel Cholesky factorization algorithms using BLAS

✍ Scribed by Glenn R. Luecke; Jae Heon Yun; Philip W. Smith

• Publisher: Springer US
• Year: 1992
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 854 KB
• Volume: 6
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0920-8542
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00155804

✦ Synopsis

This paper considers four parallel Cholesky factorization algorithms, including SPOTRF from the February 1992 release of LAPACK, each of which call parallel Level 2 or 3 BLAS, or both. A fifth parallel Cholesky algorithm that calls serial Level 3 BLAS is also described. The efficiency of these five algorithms on the CRAY-2, CRAY Y-MP/832, Hitachi Data Systems EX 80, and IBM 3090-600J is evaluated and compared with a vendoroptimized parallel Cholesky factorization algorithm. The fifth parallel Cholesky algorithm that calls serial Level 3 BLAS provided the best performance of all algorithms that called BLAS routines. In fact, this algorithm outperformed the Cray-optimized libsci routine (SPOTRF) by 13-44 %, depending on the problem size and the number of processors used.