Scalable Out-of-Core Solvers on Xeon Phi Cluster

Abstract

This paper documents the implementation of a distributive out-of-core (OOC) solver for performing LU and Cholesky factorizations of a large dense matrix on clusters of many-core programmable co-processors. The out-of- core algorithm combines both the left-looking and right-looking schemes aimed to minimize the movement of data between the CPU host and the co-processor, optimizing data locality as well as computing throughput. The OOC solver is built to align with the format of the ScaLAPACK software library, making it readily portable to any existing codes using ScaLAPACK. A runtime analysis conducted on Beacon (an Intel Xeon plus Intel Xeon Phi cluster which composed of 48 nodes of multi-core CPU and MIC) at the Na- tional Institute for Computational Sciences is presented. Comparison of the performance on the Intel Xeon Phi and GPU clusters are also provided.