Out of core dense solvers on Intel parallel supercomputers

Abstract

Certain engineering problems give rise to systems of linear equations AX=B, where A is a large, dense matrix. ProSolver-DES is an out-of-core dense solver for the Intel iPSC/860 system which was specifically designed for such problems. Recently Intel introduced an alternate slab-style solver which does full column pivoting. The performance of this solver is slightly less than that of ProSolver-DES, but still obtains well over 4 Gflops on a 128-node system. The Paragon-XP/S is Intel's next-generation parallel supercomputer. It provides a quantum leap in performance over the iPSC/860 in all design dimensions. At the same time, the programming model fully supports the message passing model of the iPSC/860, and programs written for the iPSC/860 will run unmodified on the Paragon system. The dense solvers will be available on Paragon and will run significantly faster.<>