UC Berkeley

Communication (data movement) often dominates a computation's runtime and energy costs, motivating organizing an algorithm's operations to minimize communication. We study communication costs of a class of algorithms including many-body and matrix/tensor computations and, more generally, loop nests operating on array variables subscripted by linear functions of the loop iteration vector. We use this algebraic relationship between variables and operations to derive communication lower bounds for these algorithms. We also discuss communication-optimal implementations that attain these bounds.