A minisymposium Parallel Numerical Linear Algebra for Extreme Scale Systems was held at the SIAM Conference on Computational Science and Engineering, Atlanta on February 28, 2017.
Today’s most powerful supercomputers are composed of hundreds of thousands of computing cores (CPUs and accelerators) connected in high speed networks that make up a massively parallel high performance computing (HPC) system. These systems are placing new demands on effective scalable numerical algorithms and software libraries, which will only increase in the future as we move towards increasingly heterogeneous systems with millions of compute cores. This minisymposium, which I organized jointly with Bo Kågström (Umeå University, Sweden), focused on addressing these challenges in the context of linear algebra problems through developing novel parallel algorithms, exploring advanced scheduling strategies and runtime systems, carrying out offline and online autotuning, and avoiding communication and synchronization bottlenecks.
The speakers were all members of the NLAFET (Parallel Numerical Linear Algebra for Future Extreme-Scale Systems) project, which is one of the high-profile extreme-scale computing research projects funded by the European Commission within the Future and Emerging Technologies (FET) program under Horizon 2020. Much of the work described in the minisymposium was carried out within NLAFET.
Around 75 people attended and there was standing room only. Here are the talks, with links to the slides. The names of the speakers are italicized.
- The Design and Implementation of a Dense Linear Algebra Library for Extreme Parallel Computers (abstract), Jack J. Dongarra, University of Tennessee and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, USA; Nicholas Higham, Mawussi Zounon, and Samuel Relton, University of Manchester, United Kingdom.
- Computing the Low Rank Approximation of a Sparse Matrix (abstract), Laura Grigori and Sebastien Cayrols, Inria, France; James W. Demmel, University of California, Berkeley, USA; Alan Ayala, Inria, France.
- Sparse Direct Solvers for Extreme Scale Computing (abstract), Iain Duff, Science & Technology Facilities Council, United Kingdom and CERFACS, Toulouse, France; Jonathan Hogg, Florent Lopez, and Stojce Nakov, Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, United Kingdom.
- Extreme-Scale Eigenvalue Reordering in the Real Schur Form (abstract), Lars Karlsson, Carl Christian Kjelgaard Mikkelsen, Mirko Myllykoski, and Bo T. Kågström, Umeå University, Sweden.
Related to this minisymposium was the two-day Workshop on Batched, Reproducible, and Reduced Precision BLAS, held a couple of days beforehand at Georgia Tech. The workshop included presentations from both academia and industry and the program contains links to the speakers’ slides.
Nick Higham 