The Cache-Oblivious Gaussian Elimination Paradigm: Theoretical Framework, Parallelization and Experimental Evaluation

Rezaul Alam Chowdhury and Vijaya Ramachandran

Theory of Computing Systems (Special Issue for SPAA'07), vol. 47 (4), pp. 878-919, 2010


Abstract
We consider triply-nested loops of the type that occur in the standard Gaussian elimination algorithm, which we denote by GEP (or the Gaussian Elimination Paradigm). We present two related cache-oblivious methods IGEP and CGEP, both of which reduce the number of I/Os performed by the computation over that performed by standard GEP by a factor of √M, where M is the size of the cache. Cache-oblivious IGEP computes in-place and solves most of the known applications of GEP including Gaussian elimination and LU-decomposition without pivoting and Floyd-Warshall all-pairs shortest paths. Cache-oblivious CGEP uses a modest amount of additional space, but is completely general and applies to any code in GEP form. Both IGEP and CGEP produce system-independent cache-efficient code, and are potentially applicable to being used by optimizing compilers for loop transformation. We present parallel IGEP and CGEP that achieve good speed-up and match the sequential caching performance cache-obliviously for both shared and distributed caches for sufficiently large inputs. We present extensive experimental results for both in-core and out-of-core performance of our algorithms. We consider both sequential and parallel implementations, and compare them with finely-tuned cache-aware BLAS code for matrix multiplication and Gaussian elimination without pivoting. Our results indicate that cache-oblivious GEP offers an attractive trade-off between efficiency and portability.

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