Multifrontal Computations on GPUs and Their Multi-core Hosts

The use of GPUs to accelerate the factoring of large sparse symmetric matrices shows the potential of yielding important benefits to a large group of widely used applications. This paper examines how a multifrontal sparse solver performs when exploiting both the GPU and its multi-core host. It demonstrates that the GPU can dramatically accelerate the solver relative to one host CPU. Furthermore, the solver can profitably exploit both the GPU to factor its larger frontal matrices and multiple threads on the host to handle the smaller frontal matrices.