PLU FACTORIZATION ON A CLUSTER OF GPUS USING FAST ETHERNET
André R. Brodtkorb, Martin Lilleeng Sætra, Trygve Fladby · 2007
In this white paper, we present a novel approach to solve linear systems of equations on a cluster using the PLU factorization. We use the graphics processing unit (GPU) as the main computational engine at each node, and a block-cyclic data distribution to solve the system. The local computation is a new way of solving the PLU factorization on the GPU. It utilizes the full four-way vectorized arithmetic found in most GPUs, and a new pivoting strategy. The global algorithm uses the message passing interface (MPI) for communication between nodes. We show that our algorithm is highly efficient on the local nodes, but bounded by the relatively slow network. A faster network will eliminate this bottleneck, and the speed of the local computations show promising results.