Section: Research Program

High-performance computing and linear algebra

Our work on high-performance computing and linear algebra is organized along three research directions. The first direction is devoted to direct solvers of sparse linear systems. The second direction is devoted to combinatorial scientific computing, that is, the design of combinatorial algorithms and tools that solve problems encountered in some of the other research themes, like the problems faced in the preprocessing phases of sparse direct solvers. The last direction deals with the adaptation of classical dense linear algebra kernels to the architecture of future computing platforms.

Direct solvers for sparse linear systems

The solution of sparse systems of linear equations (symmetric or unsymmetric, often with an irregular structure, from a few hundred thousand to a few hundred million equations) is at the heart of many scientific applications arising in domains such as geophysics, structural mechanics, chemistry, electromagnetism, numerical optimization, or computational fluid dynamics, to cite a few. The importance and diversity of applications are a main motivation to pursue research on sparse linear solvers. Because of this wide range of applications, any significant progress on solvers will have a significant impact in the world of simulation. Research on sparse direct solvers in general is very active for the following main reasons:

• many applications fields require large-scale simulations that are still too big or too complicated with respect to today's solution methods;

• the current evolution of architectures with massive, hierarchical, multicore parallelism imposes to overhaul all existing solutions, which represents a major challenge for algorithm and software development;

• the evolution of numerical needs and types of simulations increase the importance, frequency, and size of certain classes of matrices, which may benefit from a specialized processing (rather than resort to a generic one).

Our research in the field is strongly related to the software package Mumps , which is both an experimental platform for academics in the field of sparse linear algebra, and a software package that is widely used in both academia and industry. The software package Mumps enables us to (i) confront our research to the real world, (ii) develop contacts and collaborations, and (iii) receive continuous feedback from real-life applications, which is extremely critical to validate our research work. The feedback from a large user community also enables us to direct our long-term objectives towards meaningful directions.

In this context, we aim at designing parallel sparse direct methods that will scale to large modern platforms, and that are able to answer new challenges arising from applications, both efficiently—from a resource consumption point of view—and accurately—from a numerical point of view. For that, and even with increasing parallelism, we do not want to sacrifice in any manner numerical stability, based on threshold partial pivoting, one of the main originalities of our approach (our “trademark”) in the context of direct solvers for distributed-memory computers; although this makes the parallelization more complicated, applying the same pivoting strategy as in the serial case ensures numerical robustness of our approach, which we generally measure in terms of sparse backward error. In order to solve the hard problems resulting from the always-increasing demands in simulations, special attention must also necessarily be paid to memory usage (and not only execution time). This requires specific algorithmic choices and scheduling techniques. From a complementary point of view, it is also necessary to be aware of the functionality requirements from the applications and from the users, so that robust solutions can be proposed for a wide range of applications.

Among direct methods, we rely on the multifrontal method [58], [59], [63]. This method usually exhibits a good data locality and hence is efficient in cache-based systems. The task graph associated with the multifrontal method is in the form of a tree whose characteristics should be exploited in a parallel implementation.

Our work is organized along two main research directions. In the first one we aim at efficiently addressing new architectures that include massive, hierarchical parallelism. In the second one, we aim at reducing the running time complexity and the memory requirements of direct solvers, while controlling accuracy.

Combinatorial scientific computing

Combinatorial scientific computing (CSC) is a recently coined term (circa 2002) for interdisciplinary research at the intersection of discrete mathematics, computer science, and scientific computing. In particular, it refers to the development, application, and analysis of combinatorial algorithms to enable scientific computing applications. CSC's deepest roots are in the realm of direct methods for solving sparse linear systems of equations where graph theoretical models have been central to the exploitation of sparsity, since the 1960s. The general approach is to identify performance issues in a scientific computing problem, such as memory use, parallel speed up, and/or the rate of convergence of a method, and to develop combinatorial algorithms and models to tackle those issues.

Our target scientific computing applications are (i) the preprocessing phases of direct methods (in particular MUMPS), iterative methods, and hybrid methods for solving linear systems of equations, and general sparse matrix and tensor computations; and (ii) the mapping of tasks (mostly the sub-tasks of the mentioned solvers) onto modern computing platforms. We focus on the development and the use of graph and hypergraph models, and related tools such as hypergraph partitioning algorithms, to solve problems of load balancing and task mapping. We also focus on bipartite graph matching and vertex ordering methods for reducing the memory overhead and computational requirements of solvers. Although we direct our attention on these models and algorithms through the lens of linear system solvers, our solutions are general enough to be applied to some other resource optimization problems.

Dense linear algebra on post-petascale multicore platforms

The quest for efficient, yet portable, implementations of dense linear algebra kernels (QR, LU, Cholesky) has never stopped, fueled in part by each new technological evolution. First, the LAPACK library [52] relied on BLAS level 3 kernels (Basic Linear Algebra Subroutines) that enable to fully harness the computing power of a single CPU. Then the ScaLAPACK library [51] built upon LAPACK to provide a coarse-grain parallel version, where processors operate on large block-column panels. Inter-processor communications occur through highly tuned MPI send and receive primitives. The advent of multi-core processors has led to a major modification in these algorithms [53], [66], [61]. Each processor runs several threads in parallel to keep all cores within that processor busy. Tiled versions of the algorithms have thus been designed: dividing large block-column panels into several tiles allows for a decrease in the granularity down to a level where many smaller-size tasks are spawned. In the current panel, the diagonal tile is used to eliminate all the lower tiles in the panel. Because the factorization of the whole panel is now broken into the elimination of several tiles, the update operations can also be partitioned at the tile level, which generates many tasks to feed all cores.

The number of cores per processor will keep increasing in the following years. It is projected that high-end processors will include at least a few hundreds of cores. This evolution will require to design new versions of libraries. Indeed, existing libraries rely on a static distribution of the work: before the beginning of the execution of a kernel, the location and time of the execution of all of its component is decided. In theory, static solutions enable to precisely optimize executions, by taking parameters like data locality into account. At run time, these solutions proceed at the pace of the slowest of the cores, and they thus require a perfect load-balancing. With a few hundreds, if not a thousand, cores per processor, some tiny differences between the computing times on the different cores (“jitter”) are unavoidable and irremediably condemn purely static solutions. Moreover, the increase in the number of cores per processor once again mandates to increase the number of tasks that can be executed in parallel.

We study solutions that are part-static part-dynamic, because such solutions have been shown to outperform purely dynamic ones [55]. On the one hand, the distribution of work among the different nodes will still be statically defined. On the other hand, the mapping and the scheduling of tasks inside a processor will be dynamically defined. The main difficulty when building such a solution will be to design lightweight dynamic schedulers that are able to guarantee both an excellent load-balancing and a very efficient use of data locality.