Comparative study of one-sided factorizations with multiple software packages on multi-core hardware

The emergence and continuing use of multi-core architectures require changes in the existing software and sometimes even a redesign of the established algorithms in order to take advantage of now prevailing parallelism. The Parallel Linear Algebra for Scalable Multi-core Architectures (PLASMA) is a project that aims to achieve both high performance and portability across a wide range of multi-core architectures. We present in this paper a comparative study of PLASMA’s performance against established linear algebra packages (LAPACK and ScaLAPACK), against new approaches at parallel execution (Task Based Linear Algebra Subroutines – TBLAS), and against equivalent commercial software offerings (MKL, ESSL and PESSL). Our experiments were conducted on one-sided linear algebra factorizations (LU, QR and Cholesky) and used multi-core architectures (based on Intel Xeon EMT64 and IBM Power6). The performance results show improvements brought by new algorithms on up to 32 cores – the larg...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: SC
• Authors: Emmanuel Agullo, Bilel Hadri, Hatem Ltaief, Jack Dongarra
• Keywords: Linear Algebra, Multi-core Architectures, SC 2009, Scalable Multi-core Architectures