BCYCLIC: A PARALLEL BLOCK TRIDIAGONAL MATRIX CYCLIC SOLVER

Abstract

A block tri-diagonal matrix is factored with minimal fill-in using a cyclic reduction algorithm that is easily parallelized. Storage of the factored blocks allows the application of the inverse to multiple right-hand sides which may not be known at factorization time. Scalability with the number of block rows is achieved with cyclic reduction, while scalability with the block size is achieved using multithreaded routines (OPENMP, GotoBLAS) for block matrix manipulation. This dual scalability is a noteworthy feature of this new solver, as well as its ability to handle arbitrary block row and processor numbers. Comparisons with other parallel block solvers are presented.