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. In previous work, we investigated the effects of various ordering and partitioning strategies on the performance of CG using different programming paradigms and architectures. This paper makes several extensions to our prior research. First, we present a hybrid(MPI+OpenMP) implementation of the CG algorithm on the IBM SP and show that the hybrid paradigm increases programming complexity with little performance gains compared to a pure MPI implementation. For ill-conditioned linear systems, it is often necessary to use a preconditioning technique. We present MPI results for ILU(0) preconditioned CG (PCG) using the BlockSolve95 library, and show that the initial ordering of the input matrix dramatically affect PCG's performance. Finally, a multithreaded version of the PCG is developed on the Cray (Tera) MTA. Unlike the message-passing version, this implementation did not require the complexities of special orderings or graph dependency analysis. However, only limited scalability was achieved due to the lack of available thread level parallelism.