Nonzero pattern analysis and memory access optimization in GPU-based sparse LU factorization for circuit simulation
Xiaoming Chen, Du Su, Yu Wang, Huazhong Yang · 2013
The sparse matrix solver is a critical component in circuit simulators. Some researches have developed GPU-based LU factorization approaches to accelerate the sparse solver. But the performance of these solvers is constrained by the irregularities of sparse matrices. This work investigates the nonzero patterns and memory access patterns in sparse LU factorization, and explores the common features to give guidelines on the improvements of the GPU solvers. We further propose a crisscross blocked implementation on GPUs. The proposed method attains average speedups of 1.68× compared with the unblocked method and 2.2× compared with 4-threaded PARDISO, for circuit matrices.