Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

The Conjugate Gradient (CG) algorithm is perhaps the best-known iterative technique to solve sparse linear systems that are symmetric and positive definite. A sparse matrix-vector multiply (SPMV) usually accounts for most of the floating-point operations with a CG iteration. In this paper, we investigate the effects of various ordering and partitioning strategies on the performance of parallel CG and SPMV using different programming and architectures. Results show that for this class of applications, ordering significantly improves overall performance, that cache reuse may be more important than reducing communication, and that it is possible to achieve message passing performance using shared memory constructs through careful data ordering and distribution. However, a multithreaded implementation of CG on the Tera MTA does not require special ordering or partitioning to obtain high efficiency and scalability.