PETSc acceleration on novel architectures

[Matthew Knepley]

On Tue, Apr 7, 2009 at 9:51 PM, Ahmed El Zein <ahmed at azein.com> wrote:

> 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.


That is probably a mistake. OpenCL is not mature and only a few operations
in
PETSc would really benefit.

  Matt


>
> 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
> >         DRAS
> >         Rm: G17
> >         Bldg: E1.1
> >         AWE(A)
> >         Aldermaston
> >         Reading
> >         Berkshire
> >         ENGLAND
> >         RG7 4PR
> >         Tel: +44 (0)118 982 4528
> >         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
>
>


-- 
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
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