Adapting a parallel sparse direct solver to architectures with clusters of SMPs

We consider the direct solution of general sparse linear systems baseds on a multifrontal method. The approach combines partial static scheduling of the task dependency graph during the symbolic factorization and distributed dynamic scheduling during the numerical factorization to balance the work among the processes of a distributed memory computer. We show that to address clusters of Symmetric Multi-Processor (SMP) architectures, and more generally non-uniform memory access multiprocessors, our algorithms for both the static and the dynamic scheduling need to be revisited to take account of the non-uniform cost of communication. The performance analysis on an IBM SP3 with 16 processors per SMP node and up to 128 processors shows that we can significantly reduce both the amount of inter-node communication and the solution time. (C) 2003 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.