Concurrent Number Cruncher : An Efficient Sparse Linear Solver on the GPU

Luc Buatois (1) , Guillaume Caumon (2) , Bruno Lévy (1)

1 ALICE - Geometry and Lighting
2 CRPG - Centre de Recherches Pétrographiques et Géochimiques

A wide class of geometry processing and PDE resolution methods needs to solve a linear system, where the non-zero pattern of the matrix is dictated by the connectivity matrix of the mesh. The advent of GPUs with their ever-growing amount of parallel horsepower makes them a tempting resource for such numerical computations. This can be helped by new APIs (CTM from ATI and CUDA from NVIDIA) which give a direct access to the multithreaded computational resources and associated memory bandwidth of GPUs; CUDA even provides a BLAS implementation but only for dense matrices (CuBLAS). However, existing GPU linear solvers are restricted to specific types of matrices, or use non-optimal compressed row storage strategies. By combining recent GPU programming techniques with supercomputing strategies (namely block compressed row storage and register blocking), we implement a sparse generalpurpose linear solver which outperforms leading-edge CPU counterparts (MKL / ACML).

Domaines: Synthèse d'image et réalité virtuelle [cs.GR]

Luc Buatois, Guillaume Caumon, Bruno Lévy. Concurrent Number Cruncher : An Efficient Sparse Linear Solver on the GPU. High Performance Computation Conference - HPCC'07, University of Houston, Sep 2007, Houston, United States. pp.358-371, ⟨10.1007/978-3-540-75444-2_37⟩. ⟨inria-00186833⟩