[petsc-dev] Fwd: [mumps-dev] support for distributed right-hand vectors?

Alexander Grayver agrayver at gfz-potsdam.de
Sat Nov 10 07:14:44 CST 2012


Garth,

At the time I was tested PaStiX it failed for my problem:
https://lists.mcs.anl.gov/mailman/htdig/petsc-dev/2011-December/006887.html

Since then PaStiX has been updated with several critical bug fixes, so I 
should consider testing new version.

The memory scalability of the MUMPS is not nice, that is true.
Running MUMPS with default parameters on large amount of cores is often 
not optimal. I don't how much you spent tweaking parameters.
MUMPS is among the most robust distributed solvers nowadays and it is 
still being developed and hopefully will improve.

/*To petsc developers:* /are there plans to update PaStiX supplied with 
PETSc? The current version is 5.2 from 2012-06-08 and PETSc-3.3-p3 uses 
5.1.8 from 2011-02-23.

Here is changelog:
https://gforge.inria.fr/frs/shownotes.php?group_id=186&release_id=7096

On 09.11.2012 19:40, Garth N. Wells wrote:
> I've only just joined the petsc-dev list, but I'm hoping with this
> subject line my email will join the right thread . . . . (related to
> MUMPS).
>
> I've been experimenting over the past year with MUMPS and PaStiX for
> parallel LU, and found MUMPS pretty much useless because it uses so
> much memory. PaStiX was vastly superior performance-wise and it
> supports hybrid threads-MPI, which I think is essential for parallel
> LU solvers to make good use of typical multi-socket multi-core compute
> nodes. The interface, build and documentation are a bit clunky (I put
> the last point down to developer language issues), but the performance
> is good and the developers are responsive. I benchmarked PaStiX for P1
> and P2 3D linear elastic finite element problems against a leading
> commercial offering, and PaStiX was marginally faster for P1 and
> marginally slower for P2 (PaStiX performance does depend heavily on
> BLAS). I couldn't even compute the test problems with MUMPS because it
> would blow out the memory. For reference, I tested systems up to 27M
> dofs with PaStiX.
>
> Based on my experience and tests, I'd be happy to see PETSc drop MUMPS
> and focus/enhance/fix support for PaStiX.
>
> Garth


-- 
Regards,
Alexander

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