State-of-The-Art Sparse Direct Solvers Matthias Bollhöfer, Olaf Schenk, Radim Janalík, Steve Hamm, and Kiran Gullapalli Abstract In this chapter we will give an insight into modern sparse elimination meth- ods. These are driven by a preprocessing phase based on combinatorial algorithms which improve diagonal dominance, reduce fill–in and improve concurrency to allow for parallel treatment. Moreover, these methods detect dense submatrices which can be handled by dense matrix kernels based on multi-threaded level–3 BLAS. We will demonstrate for problems arising from circuit simulation how the improvement in recent years have advanced direct solution methods significantly. 1 Introduction Solving large sparse linear systems is at the heart of many application problems arising from engineering problems. Advances in combinatorial methods in combi- nation with modern computer architectures have massively influenced the design of state-of-the-art direct solvers that are feasible for solving larger systems efficiently in a computational environment with rapidly increasing memory resources and cores. Matthias Bollhöfer Institute for Computational Mathematics, TU Braunschweig, Germany, e-mail: m.bollhoefer@tu- bs.de Olaf Schenk Institute of Computational Science, Faculty of Informatics, Università della Svizzera italiana, Switzerland, e-mail:
[email protected] arXiv:1907.05309v1 [cs.DS] 11 Jul 2019 Radim Janalík Institute of Computational Science, Faculty of Informatics, Università della Svizzera italiana, Switzerland, e-mail:
[email protected] Steve Hamm NXP, United States of America, e-mail:
[email protected] Kiran Gullapalli NXP, United States of America, e-mail:
[email protected] 1 2 M. Bollhöfer, O. Schenk, R. Janalík, Steve Hamm, and K.