PETSc acceleration on novel architectures

[Ahmed El Zein]

On Tue, 2009-04-07 at 10:39 -0500, Matthew Knepley wrote:
> On Tue, Apr 7, 2009 at 9:07 AM, Stephen Ball
> <Stephen.R.Ball at awe.co.uk> wrote:
>         Hi
>         
>         We are keen to start investigating whether or not PETSc is
>         suitable for
>         acceleration on novel architectures like GPUs, Cell
>         processors, etc.
>         
>         I would very much like to get your opinions on this.
>         
>         Do you think such an endeavour is at all feasible with PETSc?
>         If so,
>         what areas of PETSc do you think our efforts would best be
>         spent?
>         
>         Should we for example focus on matrix operations, or on
>         specific
>         preconditioners or solvers? Where would be a good place to
>         start?
>         
>         Can you suggest some specific routines/functions in PETSc that
>         are
>         potential candidates for acceleration?
> 
> We are actually already working on this, and I plan on having a
> PETSc-GPU
> come out at the end of the year. 

What language are you using? I would have thought that OpenCL would be
the best solution. Maybe even rewriting the whole of PETSc in OpenCL,
targeting both multicore CPUs and a few novel architectures at the same
time. AMD and NVIDIA are both going to support OpenCL for their GPUs and
I believe that it will be supported on Intel's larrabee and the Cell
processor. 

Ahmed

> Therefore, I suggest working on PCs that
> are specific to your problems. People are already doing good work on
> sparse
> matrices in general, and solvers will see no speedup at all, since
> they are all
> logic.
> 
>    Matt
>  
>         
>         Regards
>         
>         Stephen R. Ball
>         Advanced Technologies
>         HPC
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>         e-mail: stephen.r.ball at awe.co.uk
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> 
> -- 
> What most experimenters take for granted before they begin their
> experiments is infinitely more interesting than any results to which
> their experiments lead.
> -- Norbert Wiener