Abstract
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 vendor-optimized 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.
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This work was supported by grants from IMSL, Inc., and Hitachi Data Systems. The first version of this paper was presented as a poster session at Supercomputing '90, New York City, November 1990.
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Luecke, G.R., Yun, J.H. & Smith, P.W. Performance of parallel Cholesky factorization algorithms using BLAS. J Supercomput 6, 315–329 (1992). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00155804
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00155804