Section: New Software and Platforms

HIPS

Participant : Pierre Ramet [corresponding member] .

Multilevel method, domain decomposition, Schur complement, parallel iterative solver.

HIPS (Hierarchical Iterative Parallel Solver) is a scientific library that provides an efficient parallel iterative solver for very large sparse linear systems.

The key point of the methods implemented in HIPS is to define an ordering and a partition of the unknowns that relies on a form of nested dissection ordering in which cross points in the separators play a special role (Hierarchical Interface Decomposition ordering). The subgraphs obtained by nested dissection correspond to the unknowns that are eliminated using a direct method and the Schur complement system on the remaining of the unknowns (that correspond to the interface between the sub-graphs viewed as sub-domains) is solved using an iterative method (GMRES or Conjugate Gradient at the time being). This special ordering and partitioning allows for the use of dense block algorithms both in the direct and iterative part of the solver and provides a high degree of parallelism to these algorithms. The code provides a hybrid method which blends direct and iterative solvers. HIPS exploits the partitioning and multistage ILU techniques to enable a highly parallel scheme where several subdomains can be assigned to the same process. It also provides a scalar preconditioner based on the multistage ILUT factorization.

HIPS can be used as a standalone program that reads a sparse linear system from a file ; it also provides an interface to be called from any C, C++ or Fortran code. It handles symmetric, unsymmetric, real or complex matrices. Thus, HIPS is a software library that provides several methods to build an efficient preconditioner in almost all situations.

HIPS is publicly available at http://hips.gforge.inria.fr under the Inria CeCILL licence.