Object-Oriented Techniques for Sparse Matrix Computations in Fortran 2003

Salvatore Filippone (1) , Alfredo Buttari (2, 3)

1 Università degli Studi di Roma Tor Vergata [Roma] = University of Rome Tor Vergata
2 IRIT-APO - Algorithmes Parallèles et Optimisation
3 CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

The efficiency of a sparse linear algebra operation heavily relies on the ability of the sparse matrix storage format to exploit the computing power of the underlying hardware. Since no format is universally better than the others across all possible kinds of operations and computers, sparse linear algebra software packages should provide facilities to easily implement and integrate new storage formats within a sparse linear algebra application without the need to modify it; it should also allow to dynamically change a storage format at run-time depending on the specific operations to be performed. Aiming at these important features, we present an Object Oriented design model for a sparse linear algebra package which relies on Design Patterns. We show that an implementation of our model can be efficiently achieved through some of the unique features of the Fortran 2003 language. Experimental results show that the proposed software infrastructure improves the modularity and ease of use of the code at no performance loss.

Mots clés: Object-Oriented Design; G13 [Numerical Analysis]: Numerical Linear Algebra-Sparse; information hiding; structured; and very large systems (direct and iterative methods); G4 [Mathematical Software]: Algorithm design and analysis General Terms: Mathematics of computing; Algorithms; Design Additional Key Words and Phrases: Sparse Matrices; D211 [Software Engineering]: Software Architectures-Data abstrac- tion; sparse matrices; Mathematics of computing

Domaines: Calcul parallèle, distribué et partagé [cs.DC]; Logiciel mathématique [cs.MS]

Salvatore Filippone, Alfredo Buttari. Object-Oriented Techniques for Sparse Matrix Computations in Fortran 2003. ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software, 2012, 38 (4), pp.1-20. ⟨10.1145/2331130.2331131⟩. ⟨hal-02419121⟩