[petsc-users] Using direct solvers in parallel

[Xiangdong Liang]

There is another sparse direct solver that PETSc supports: PaStix. You
can try it by --download-pastix.

Xiangdong


On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 5:34 AM, Anton Popov <popov at uni-mainz.de> wrote:
> On 5/15/12 9:25 AM, Thomas Witkowski wrote:
>>
>> I made some comparisons of using umfpack, superlu, superlu_dist and mumps
>> to solve systems with sparse matrices arising from finite element method.
>> The size of the matrices range from around 50000 to more than 3 million
>> unknowns. I used 1, 2, 4, 8 and 16 nodes to make the benchmark. Now, I
>> wonder that in all cases the sequential umfpack was the fastest one. So even
>> with 16 cores, superlu_dist and mumps are slower. Can anybody of you confirm
>> this observation? Are there any other parallel direct solvers around which
>> are more efficient?
>>
>> Thomas
>
> You should definitely try PARDISO. On shared memory machine is unbeatable by
> any kind of MPI-based solver, and offers functionality for both symmetric
> and non-symmetric matrices. There is a version available from MKL library.
>
> If you're fine enough with symmetric matrices, then this thing - HSL MA87 -
> is even better than PARDISO. It's a commercial solver, but it's free for
> academic use.
>
> The only "problem" I see here is that both of them are difficult to use
> together with PETSc, since they're OMP-based. But difficult probably doesn't
> mean impossible.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Anton
>